Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry

Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry
Author: Charles Altieri
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2009-04-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521274135

Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry is an inquiry into the cultural roles lyric poetry does and can play in our age. Charles Altieri first establishes a dominant mode in 'serious' American poetry by identifying current assumptions inherent in the teaching of creative writing and the awarding of prizes and contracts. The dominant mode is seen not as a prescribed style but as a set of styles that share assumptions and that tend to seek the same narrow audience. Altieri views this mode as essentially scenic, presenting in brief dramatic settings subdued, carefully wrought emotions that build to a climactic tactile image. In examining why the style appeals, the author suggests that we find in the dominant mode models of the self, of the power of language, and of the nature of emotions that are very close to the prudential narcissism of the professional classes. Two theses follow: that contemporary poetry can be approached as a paradigm for analysing literature in cultural terms (since we know the culture well on independent grounds); and that the cultural analogies help demonstrate the pressures on younger poets to explore styles that break from or attempt to overthrow the dominant mode.

The Utopian Moment in Contemporary American Poetry

The Utopian Moment in Contemporary American Poetry
Author: Norman Finkelstein
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 198
Release: 1993
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838752470

This second edition includes all of the material from the first -- in-depth analyses of the work of such poets as George Oppen, John Ashbery, Robert Duncan, and William Bronk -- as well as a new Preface, and a lengthy chapter on the younger language poets.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry
Author: Craig Svonkin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 549
Release: 2023-01-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350062510

With chapters written by leading scholars such as Steven Gould Axelrod, Cary Nelson, and Marjorie Perloff, this comprehensive Handbook explores the full range and diversity of poetry and criticism in 21st-century America. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry covers such topics as: · Major histories and genealogies of post-war poetry – from the language poets and the Black Arts Movement to New York school and the Beats · Poetry, identity and community – from African American, Chicana/o and Native American poetry to Queer verse and the poetics of disability · Key genres and forms – including digital, visual, documentary and children's poetry · Central critical themes – economics, publishing, popular culture, ecopoetics, translation and biography The book also includes an interview section in which major contemporary poets such as Rae Armantrout, and Claudia Rankine reflect on the craft and value of poetry today.

The Fate of American Poetry

The Fate of American Poetry
Author: Jonathan Holden
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2008-07-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0820333115

Readers of Holden's splendid new book will be rewarded by his summary of the latest battle: neo-formalists versus post-(post?)-modernists versus creative writing programs versus whatever. The decline of modernism is also examined. Holden rightly chastises those who decry the institutionalization of poetry; details the current state of lyric, narrative, and political poetry; and gives sensitive, intelligent readings of works by new and established poets. An important book by a solid poet and critic. Highly recommended. --Vincent D. Balitas.

Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century

Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century
Author: Eric L. Haralson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 2479
Release: 2014-01-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317763211

The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the century. Entries fall into three main categories: poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career; entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and topical entries, which offer analyses of a given period of literary production, school, thematically constructed category, or other verse tradition that historically has been in dialogue with the poetry of the United States.

A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry

A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry
Author: Neil Roberts
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 648
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0470998660

In the twentieth century more people spoke English and more people wrote poetry than in the whole of previous history, and this Companion strives to make sense of this crowded poetical era. The original contributions by leading international scholars and practising poets were written as the contributors adjusted to the idea that the possibilities of twentieth-century poetry were exhausted and finite. However, the volume also looks forward to the poetry and readings that the new century will bring. The Companion embraces the extraordinary development of poetry over the century in twenty English-speaking countries; a century which began with a bipolar transatlantic connection in modernism and ended with the decentred heterogeneity of post-colonialism. Representation of the 'canonical' and the 'marginal' is therefore balanced, including the full integration of women poets and feminist approaches and the in-depth treatment of post-colonial poets from various national traditions. Discussion of context, intertextualities and formal approaches illustrates the increasing self-consciousness and self-reflexivity of the period, whilst a 'Readings' section offers new readings of key selected texts. The volume as a whole offers critical and contextual coverage of the full range of English-language poetry in the last century.

Poetics of Place

Poetics of Place
Author: Dermot McCarthy
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 344
Release: 1991
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780773508156

Ralph Gustafson's personal growth as a poet, during a career which spans more than half a century, in many ways reflects the development of modern Canadian poetry as a whole. A Poetics of Place provides the only available examination of the career of this pre-eminent Canadian poet, as well as insightful, new readings of almost all his poems.

Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co

Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co
Author: Suzanne Ferguson
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2003
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781572332294

Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co.: Middle-Generation Poets in Context Takes on the oft-noted but little explored friendship of three of the most respected poets of the twentieth century. Editor Suzanne Ferguson collects eighteen essays that explore the literary, personal, and political affiliations of Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell, influential literary figures who flourished in the periods between modernism and postmodernism. Essay in the first section of the book directly compare the subjects, while sections on each of the poets follow. The contributors unpack received wisdom on the poets, revising and updating our conceptions. The multiple viewpoints reflect on one another, shedding provocative light on the group as a whole, and revealing the ways the study of poets in their historical context helps make them not only accessible but also relevant to today's reader. The Contributors: Edward Hirsch, Steven Gould Axelrod, Jeredith Merrin, Thomas Travisano, Diederik Oostdijk, Richard Flynn, Nelson Hathcock, Florian Hild, Stephen Burt, James McCorkle, Ross Leckie, Meg Schoerke, Lurel Kornhiser, Francesco Rognoni, Christian Sisack, Ernest J. Smith, and Elise Partridge. The Editor: Suzanne Ferguson is Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of Humanities, Emerita, at Case Western Reserve University. She is author of The Poetry of Randall Jarrell, editor of Critical Essays on Randall Jarrell, and coeditor of Literature and the Visual Arts in Contemporary Society. Her articles have appeared in Georgia Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Word and Image, and other journals.

Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire

Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire
Author: Hugh Foley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2022-08-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192671278

What is the difference between the ‘I’ of a poem—the lyric subject— and the liberal subject of rights? Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire uses this question to re-examine the work of five major American poets, changing our understanding of their writing and the field of post-war American poetry. Through extended readings of the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Amiri Baraka, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham, Hugh Foley shows how poets have imagined liberalism as a problem for poetry. Foley's book offers a new approach to ongoing debates about the nature of lyric by demonstrating the entanglement of ideas about the lyric poem with the development of twentieth-century liberal discussions of individuality. Arguing that the nature of American empire in this period—underpinned by the discourse of individual rights—forced poets to reckon with this entanglement, it demonstrates how this reckoning helped to shape poetry in the post-war period. By tracing the ways a lyric poem performs personhood, and the ways that this person can be distinguished from the individual envisioned by post-war liberalism, Foley shows how each poet stages a critique of liberalism from inside the standpoint of ‘lyric'>. This book demonstrates the capacities of poetry for rethinking its own relation to history and politics, providing a new perspective on a vital era of American poetry.

The Didactic Muse

The Didactic Muse
Author: Willard Spiegelman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2014-07-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1400860261

Writing with the vigor and elan that readers have come to expect from his many astute reviews and essays, Willard Spiegelman maintains that contemporary American poets have returned to the poetic aims of an earlier era: to edify, as well as to delight, and thus to serve the "didactic muse." What Spiegelman says about individual poets--such as Nemerov, Hecht, Ginsberg, Pinsky, Ammons, Rich, and Merrill, among others--is wonderfully insightful. Furthermore, his outlook on their work--the way he takes quite literally the teacherly elements of their poems--challenges long-standing conceptions both about contemporary writing and about the poetry of the Eliot-Pound-Stevens-Williams generation. Beginning the book with a meditation on W. H. Auden's legacy to American poets, Spiegelman ends with a discussion of the multiple scenes of learning in Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover, which he identifies as not only the major epic poem of the second half of the twentieth century but also as the period's most important georgic: a textbook full of scientific, mythic, artistic, and human instruction. The Didactic Muse reminds us that poets have traditionally acknowledged their function as teachers, from Horace's advice that poetry should please and instruct to Robert Frost's aphorism that a poem "begins in delight and ends in wisdom." Whereas many of the critical remarks of the most important Romantic and modern poets suggest their desperate attempts to separate poetry from instruction, Spiegelman demonstrates that their practices often contradicted their theories. And he shows that our best contemporary poets are now embracing the older, classical paradigms. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.