Aidan Wasley
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691136790
- eISBN:
- 9781400836352
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691136790.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter argues that Auden's extensive and largely unexplored impact on the post-war generation of American poets helped not only to define the terms by which these younger poets framed their own ...
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This chapter argues that Auden's extensive and largely unexplored impact on the post-war generation of American poets helped not only to define the terms by which these younger poets framed their own work and careers, but also offered a new and influential model for understanding what it meant to write poetry in America after World War II and after Modernism. In particular, Auden's redefinition of his own poetic identity following his emigration from England helped to shape American poetry in terms of what Auden called “the burden of choice”: How to select an inheritance from the myriad possibilities opened up in the wake of Modernism's shattering of notions of a unified native tradition. By framing his post-1939 poetry as “a way of happening,” Auden inaugurated a poetic vision of post-Modernist America as an open, inclusive text defined not in terms of shared ideals of national, ideological, or historical inheritance, but by the freedom, and necessity, to choose among the kaleidoscopic range of formal, cultural, or transnational poetic identities made available by the collapse of those earlier ideals.Less
This chapter argues that Auden's extensive and largely unexplored impact on the post-war generation of American poets helped not only to define the terms by which these younger poets framed their own work and careers, but also offered a new and influential model for understanding what it meant to write poetry in America after World War II and after Modernism. In particular, Auden's redefinition of his own poetic identity following his emigration from England helped to shape American poetry in terms of what Auden called “the burden of choice”: How to select an inheritance from the myriad possibilities opened up in the wake of Modernism's shattering of notions of a unified native tradition. By framing his post-1939 poetry as “a way of happening,” Auden inaugurated a poetic vision of post-Modernist America as an open, inclusive text defined not in terms of shared ideals of national, ideological, or historical inheritance, but by the freedom, and necessity, to choose among the kaleidoscopic range of formal, cultural, or transnational poetic identities made available by the collapse of those earlier ideals.
Oren Izenberg
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691144832
- eISBN:
- 9781400836529
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691144832.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book explores a set of interdependent problems in the history, theory, and politics of recent Anglo-American poetry while offering a challenge and an alternative to a nearly unanimous ...
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This book explores a set of interdependent problems in the history, theory, and politics of recent Anglo-American poetry while offering a challenge and an alternative to a nearly unanimous literary–historical consensus that divides poetry into two warring camps—post-Romantic and postmodern; symbolist and constructivist; traditionalist and avant-garde. The book advocates a shift of emphasis, from “poems” as objects or occasions for experience to “poetry” as an occasion for reestablishing or revealing the most basic unit of social life and for securing the most fundamental object of moral regard. The book considers Language poetry as well as the work of William Butler Yeats, George Oppen, and Frank O'Hara—poets who seek ways to make their poetic thinking yield accounts of personhood that are at once minimal and universal.Less
This book explores a set of interdependent problems in the history, theory, and politics of recent Anglo-American poetry while offering a challenge and an alternative to a nearly unanimous literary–historical consensus that divides poetry into two warring camps—post-Romantic and postmodern; symbolist and constructivist; traditionalist and avant-garde. The book advocates a shift of emphasis, from “poems” as objects or occasions for experience to “poetry” as an occasion for reestablishing or revealing the most basic unit of social life and for securing the most fundamental object of moral regard. The book considers Language poetry as well as the work of William Butler Yeats, George Oppen, and Frank O'Hara—poets who seek ways to make their poetic thinking yield accounts of personhood that are at once minimal and universal.
Aidan Wasley
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691136790
- eISBN:
- 9781400836352
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691136790.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter first details W. H. Auden's arrival in New York in January 1939. His emigration from England, and his arrival in America marked a crucial moment in twentieth-century literary history, ...
More
This chapter first details W. H. Auden's arrival in New York in January 1939. His emigration from England, and his arrival in America marked a crucial moment in twentieth-century literary history, when the heir apparent to T. S. Eliot as the dominant presence in British poetry abandoned his English career and retraced Eliot's own path back across the Atlantic to start anew. The impact of that moment, and Auden's subsequent American career, are still being felt in American poetry seven decades later. The chapter then discusses his poem “Atlantis,” where he invokes the myth of the lost utopia, to illustrate what he calls “a poetic vision” of art's capacity for moral instruction, even as it recognizes its limitations.Less
This chapter first details W. H. Auden's arrival in New York in January 1939. His emigration from England, and his arrival in America marked a crucial moment in twentieth-century literary history, when the heir apparent to T. S. Eliot as the dominant presence in British poetry abandoned his English career and retraced Eliot's own path back across the Atlantic to start anew. The impact of that moment, and Auden's subsequent American career, are still being felt in American poetry seven decades later. The chapter then discusses his poem “Atlantis,” where he invokes the myth of the lost utopia, to illustrate what he calls “a poetic vision” of art's capacity for moral instruction, even as it recognizes its limitations.
Matthew Hart
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390339
- eISBN:
- 9780199776191
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390339.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter considers the aesthetic, literary‐historical, and political meanings of the term “Afro‐modernism.” It first introduces Melvin B. Tolson's modernist epic, Harlem Gallery (1965), via the ...
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This chapter considers the aesthetic, literary‐historical, and political meanings of the term “Afro‐modernism.” It first introduces Melvin B. Tolson's modernist epic, Harlem Gallery (1965), via the innovative blues quatrains of Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge (1995), explaining how both poems exemplify an embattled “Afro‐modernist” tradition. The chapter then analyzes Tolson's 1953 Libretto for the Republic of Liberia via the documentary evidence of his appointment as Liberian Poet Laureate. As a late modernist epic about an oligarchic state led by freed slaves, Libretto witnesses a crucial overlapping of the narratives of diasporic nationalism and African “local imperialism.” The chapter concludes by explaining how the poetic form of Libretto registers the schism between the modernizing statecraft of the Liberian elite and the transgressive “countermodernity” of Pan‐Africanism.Less
This chapter considers the aesthetic, literary‐historical, and political meanings of the term “Afro‐modernism.” It first introduces Melvin B. Tolson's modernist epic, Harlem Gallery (1965), via the innovative blues quatrains of Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge (1995), explaining how both poems exemplify an embattled “Afro‐modernist” tradition. The chapter then analyzes Tolson's 1953 Libretto for the Republic of Liberia via the documentary evidence of his appointment as Liberian Poet Laureate. As a late modernist epic about an oligarchic state led by freed slaves, Libretto witnesses a crucial overlapping of the narratives of diasporic nationalism and African “local imperialism.” The chapter concludes by explaining how the poetic form of Libretto registers the schism between the modernizing statecraft of the Liberian elite and the transgressive “countermodernity” of Pan‐Africanism.
Aidan Wasley
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691136790
- eISBN:
- 9781400836352
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691136790.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter discusses Auden's influence on John Ashbery. By looking at the development of Ashbery's career through the prism of his early apprenticeship to Auden, and by taking Ashbery's claims ...
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This chapter discusses Auden's influence on John Ashbery. By looking at the development of Ashbery's career through the prism of his early apprenticeship to Auden, and by taking Ashbery's claims about his own poetics seriously, it challenges some familiar critical presumptions about Ashbery, prompted by a few basic questions: What are we to make of the disparity between how Ashbery sees himself and how he is seen? What is the responsibility of critics toward authorial claims of self-knowledge and intention? Is there something to be learned by listening to this poet and his poems, rather than reading through or against them? What does it mean to read Ashbery as a self-conscious inheritor of Auden's civic tradition, rather than heir to the various Romantic traditions with which he is customarily linked? In the end, the goal is less to reject prior understandings of Ashbery than to augment and complicate them, and suggest that in doing so, we discover a poet who is even richer—both more familiar and more strange, more conventional and more radical—than we may have seen.Less
This chapter discusses Auden's influence on John Ashbery. By looking at the development of Ashbery's career through the prism of his early apprenticeship to Auden, and by taking Ashbery's claims about his own poetics seriously, it challenges some familiar critical presumptions about Ashbery, prompted by a few basic questions: What are we to make of the disparity between how Ashbery sees himself and how he is seen? What is the responsibility of critics toward authorial claims of self-knowledge and intention? Is there something to be learned by listening to this poet and his poems, rather than reading through or against them? What does it mean to read Ashbery as a self-conscious inheritor of Auden's civic tradition, rather than heir to the various Romantic traditions with which he is customarily linked? In the end, the goal is less to reject prior understandings of Ashbery than to augment and complicate them, and suggest that in doing so, we discover a poet who is even richer—both more familiar and more strange, more conventional and more radical—than we may have seen.
Josephine Nock-Hee Park
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195332735
- eISBN:
- 9780199868148
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195332735.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, American, 20th Century Literature
This book traces an American literary history of transpacific alliances which spans the 20th century. Increasing material and economic ties between the U.S. and East Asia at the end of the 19th ...
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This book traces an American literary history of transpacific alliances which spans the 20th century. Increasing material and economic ties between the U.S. and East Asia at the end of the 19th century facilitated an imagined spiritual and aesthetic accord that bridged the Pacific, and this study reads the expression and repercussions of these links in American Orientalist and Asian American poetry. After considering both the transcendence and constraints of a structure of alliance between East and West in the introductory chapter, the first half of the study examines two key American instigators of Orientalist poetics, Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder, who imagined an identity between Eastern philosophy and idealized notions of America. Their literary alliances imposed a singular burden on Asian American poets, and the second half of the study considers a range of formal negotiations with this legacy in the poetry of Lawson Fusao Inada, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Myung Mi Kim. In examining avant‐garde Asian American poetry against an American Orientalist past, this book reads the intersection of modernist and minority poetics.Less
This book traces an American literary history of transpacific alliances which spans the 20th century. Increasing material and economic ties between the U.S. and East Asia at the end of the 19th century facilitated an imagined spiritual and aesthetic accord that bridged the Pacific, and this study reads the expression and repercussions of these links in American Orientalist and Asian American poetry. After considering both the transcendence and constraints of a structure of alliance between East and West in the introductory chapter, the first half of the study examines two key American instigators of Orientalist poetics, Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder, who imagined an identity between Eastern philosophy and idealized notions of America. Their literary alliances imposed a singular burden on Asian American poets, and the second half of the study considers a range of formal negotiations with this legacy in the poetry of Lawson Fusao Inada, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Myung Mi Kim. In examining avant‐garde Asian American poetry against an American Orientalist past, this book reads the intersection of modernist and minority poetics.
Aidan Wasley
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691136790
- eISBN:
- 9781400836352
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691136790.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
W. H. Auden's emigration from England to the United States in 1939 marked more than a turning point in his own life and work—it changed the course of American poetry itself. This book takes, for the ...
More
W. H. Auden's emigration from England to the United States in 1939 marked more than a turning point in his own life and work—it changed the course of American poetry itself. This book takes, for the first time, the full measure of Auden's influence on American poetry. Combining a broad survey of Auden's midcentury U.S. cultural presence with an account of his dramatic impact on a wide range of younger American poets—from Allen Ginsberg to Sylvia Plath—the book offers a new history of postwar American poetry. For Auden, facing private crisis and global catastrophe, moving to the United States became, in the famous words of his first American poem, a new “way of happening.” But his redefinition of his work had a significance that was felt far beyond the pages of his own books. This book shows how Auden's signal role in the work and lives of an entire younger generation of American poets challenges conventional literary histories that place Auden outside the American poetic tradition. The book pays special attention to three of Auden's most distinguished American inheritors, presenting major new readings of James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Adrienne Rich. The result is a persuasive and compelling demonstration of a novel claim: In order to understand modern American poetry, we need to understand Auden's central place within it.Less
W. H. Auden's emigration from England to the United States in 1939 marked more than a turning point in his own life and work—it changed the course of American poetry itself. This book takes, for the first time, the full measure of Auden's influence on American poetry. Combining a broad survey of Auden's midcentury U.S. cultural presence with an account of his dramatic impact on a wide range of younger American poets—from Allen Ginsberg to Sylvia Plath—the book offers a new history of postwar American poetry. For Auden, facing private crisis and global catastrophe, moving to the United States became, in the famous words of his first American poem, a new “way of happening.” But his redefinition of his work had a significance that was felt far beyond the pages of his own books. This book shows how Auden's signal role in the work and lives of an entire younger generation of American poets challenges conventional literary histories that place Auden outside the American poetic tradition. The book pays special attention to three of Auden's most distinguished American inheritors, presenting major new readings of James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Adrienne Rich. The result is a persuasive and compelling demonstration of a novel claim: In order to understand modern American poetry, we need to understand Auden's central place within it.
Aidan Wasley
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691136790
- eISBN:
- 9781400836352
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691136790.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter discusses Auden's influence on Adrienne Rich. It argues that from her early emulation through her mature repudiation of his example, Auden's place in Rich's work and thought has ...
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This chapter discusses Auden's influence on Adrienne Rich. It argues that from her early emulation through her mature repudiation of his example, Auden's place in Rich's work and thought has persisted. As both an individual influence and as a representative of an entire range of poetic concerns which she has inherited and adapted, Auden comes to stand for poetic tradition itself—the tradition that gave her birth, and through and against which she has striven to define herself. For Rich, Auden sets the poetic terms—not always positively—out of which she constructs her own poetic identity. Like poetry itself, the figure of Auden and what he represents have been, throughout her career, ineluctable.Less
This chapter discusses Auden's influence on Adrienne Rich. It argues that from her early emulation through her mature repudiation of his example, Auden's place in Rich's work and thought has persisted. As both an individual influence and as a representative of an entire range of poetic concerns which she has inherited and adapted, Auden comes to stand for poetic tradition itself—the tradition that gave her birth, and through and against which she has striven to define herself. For Rich, Auden sets the poetic terms—not always positively—out of which she constructs her own poetic identity. Like poetry itself, the figure of Auden and what he represents have been, throughout her career, ineluctable.
Andrew Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195181005
- eISBN:
- 9780199851010
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195181005.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This book of postwar American poetry's obsession with friendship and its pleasures, limitations, and contradictions borrows its title from Ralph Waldo Emerson's “Friendship.” Emerson drives home his ...
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This book of postwar American poetry's obsession with friendship and its pleasures, limitations, and contradictions borrows its title from Ralph Waldo Emerson's “Friendship.” Emerson drives home his belief that true friendship, at its most intense and productive, is a wonderful yet confounding contradiction. This equivocal attitude about friendship and the possibilities for communion with others has reverberated throughout the history and development of American poetry. The book argues that this troubling yet generative clash between friendship and non-conformity is central to post-World War II American poetry and its development. By focusing on the work and interrelations of some of the most important and influential postmodernist American poets—the “New York School” poets Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery and their close contemporary Amiri Baraka—the book investigates the peculiar dynamics of American avant-garde poetic communities and the uneasy role of the individual within them.Less
This book of postwar American poetry's obsession with friendship and its pleasures, limitations, and contradictions borrows its title from Ralph Waldo Emerson's “Friendship.” Emerson drives home his belief that true friendship, at its most intense and productive, is a wonderful yet confounding contradiction. This equivocal attitude about friendship and the possibilities for communion with others has reverberated throughout the history and development of American poetry. The book argues that this troubling yet generative clash between friendship and non-conformity is central to post-World War II American poetry and its development. By focusing on the work and interrelations of some of the most important and influential postmodernist American poets—the “New York School” poets Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery and their close contemporary Amiri Baraka—the book investigates the peculiar dynamics of American avant-garde poetic communities and the uneasy role of the individual within them.
Andrew Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195181005
- eISBN:
- 9780199851010
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195181005.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Pragmatist poetics offers a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing the rhetoric, the obsessions, the tactics, and the ambivalences that operate in experimental American poetry, especially with regard to ...
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Pragmatist poetics offers a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing the rhetoric, the obsessions, the tactics, and the ambivalences that operate in experimental American poetry, especially with regard to the three major themes: community, individualism, and an obsession with flux and mobility. However, unlike most other recent accounts of the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and pragmatism on American poetry, this chapter explores how this lineage extends beyond the modernist generation. The chapter's intention here is not to attempt to define or explain the enormous wealth and complexity of pragmatism itself, but rather to explore a set of far-reaching tropes, concepts, and paradoxes embedded in American philosophy that the poets perpetuate and challenge. It is worth mentioning here that this congruence between Emerson, pragmatism, and experimental poetry, “New American Poetry” has continued to the present moment.Less
Pragmatist poetics offers a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing the rhetoric, the obsessions, the tactics, and the ambivalences that operate in experimental American poetry, especially with regard to the three major themes: community, individualism, and an obsession with flux and mobility. However, unlike most other recent accounts of the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and pragmatism on American poetry, this chapter explores how this lineage extends beyond the modernist generation. The chapter's intention here is not to attempt to define or explain the enormous wealth and complexity of pragmatism itself, but rather to explore a set of far-reaching tropes, concepts, and paradoxes embedded in American philosophy that the poets perpetuate and challenge. It is worth mentioning here that this congruence between Emerson, pragmatism, and experimental poetry, “New American Poetry” has continued to the present moment.
Aidan Wasley
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691136790
- eISBN:
- 9781400836352
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691136790.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Auden's death on September 29, 1973 prompted an enormous range of poetic responses from younger American poets, many of them following Auden's example as Auden had followed Yeats, both in using the ...
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Auden's death on September 29, 1973 prompted an enormous range of poetic responses from younger American poets, many of them following Auden's example as Auden had followed Yeats, both in using the poet's own language in their memorials for him and in turning the moment, and their readings of the meaning of Auden's life and work, toward their own individual artistic arguments and purposes. Indeed, no twentieth-century poet has spawned as many elegies, eulogies, and remembrances from as wide a range of practicing poets as Auden. This chapter surveys a few of these poetic farewells to Auden, from across a broad spectrum of American verse, which provide a compelling testimonial to, and concluding perspective on, his impact on an entire generation—and beyond—of American poetry. These include the work of James Schuyler, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Louis Simpson, Irving Feldman, and Derek Walcott.Less
Auden's death on September 29, 1973 prompted an enormous range of poetic responses from younger American poets, many of them following Auden's example as Auden had followed Yeats, both in using the poet's own language in their memorials for him and in turning the moment, and their readings of the meaning of Auden's life and work, toward their own individual artistic arguments and purposes. Indeed, no twentieth-century poet has spawned as many elegies, eulogies, and remembrances from as wide a range of practicing poets as Auden. This chapter surveys a few of these poetic farewells to Auden, from across a broad spectrum of American verse, which provide a compelling testimonial to, and concluding perspective on, his impact on an entire generation—and beyond—of American poetry. These include the work of James Schuyler, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Louis Simpson, Irving Feldman, and Derek Walcott.
Peter Middleton
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226290003
- eISBN:
- 9780226290140
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226290140.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This book argues that after WWII American poets found themselves in an increasingly scientific world where natural and social sciences claimed exclusive rights to knowledge of matter and mind. ...
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This book argues that after WWII American poets found themselves in an increasingly scientific world where natural and social sciences claimed exclusive rights to knowledge of matter and mind. Physics led the way. This encouraged other disciplines, especially social sciences, to borrow physics concepts to form their own scientific conceptual schemes. Around mid-century, Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Olson developed similarly would-be scientific models for a poetics of inquiry. The book compares their efforts, and places them in a wider context of a history of interrelations between modern American poetry and science since the modernist period. It is argued that literary theory has often lacked resources to study such epistemological competition. Physicists such as Oppenheimer and Schröger were interested in poetry, especially as an example of the difficulties of communicating quantum strangeness. During the 1950s, Rukeyser and Olson gradually abandoned the attempt to construct their own conceptual schemes using spare parts from physics. Olson adopted Whitehead’s philosophy; Rukeyser turned to narrative. By contrast, Robert Duncan embraced conceptual pluralism and continued to engage with science. Other poets found different ways to use and critique the methods of science. Later chapters give close readings of poems by Rae Armantrout, Jackson Mac Low, George Oppen and Amiri Baraka that engage with specific articles in the Scientific American. Its role in American society is explored. The book concludes with a brief discussion of the impact on poetry of the shift from physics to molecular biology as the paradigm of scientific method.Less
This book argues that after WWII American poets found themselves in an increasingly scientific world where natural and social sciences claimed exclusive rights to knowledge of matter and mind. Physics led the way. This encouraged other disciplines, especially social sciences, to borrow physics concepts to form their own scientific conceptual schemes. Around mid-century, Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Olson developed similarly would-be scientific models for a poetics of inquiry. The book compares their efforts, and places them in a wider context of a history of interrelations between modern American poetry and science since the modernist period. It is argued that literary theory has often lacked resources to study such epistemological competition. Physicists such as Oppenheimer and Schröger were interested in poetry, especially as an example of the difficulties of communicating quantum strangeness. During the 1950s, Rukeyser and Olson gradually abandoned the attempt to construct their own conceptual schemes using spare parts from physics. Olson adopted Whitehead’s philosophy; Rukeyser turned to narrative. By contrast, Robert Duncan embraced conceptual pluralism and continued to engage with science. Other poets found different ways to use and critique the methods of science. Later chapters give close readings of poems by Rae Armantrout, Jackson Mac Low, George Oppen and Amiri Baraka that engage with specific articles in the Scientific American. Its role in American society is explored. The book concludes with a brief discussion of the impact on poetry of the shift from physics to molecular biology as the paradigm of scientific method.
Aidan Wasley
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691136790
- eISBN:
- 9781400836352
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691136790.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter discusses Auden's influence on James Merrill. It suggests that Merrill looked to Auden as the guide who could instruct him and encourage him to enjoy the feast of the full range of ...
More
This chapter discusses Auden's influence on James Merrill. It suggests that Merrill looked to Auden as the guide who could instruct him and encourage him to enjoy the feast of the full range of poetic modes. Merrill would later begin that instruction, starting work on a new project that would aim to unite craft and sentiment, aesthetics and engagement, and whose vast ambition would more than encompass “what it all means, and what his neighbor feels.” That project was The Changing Light at Sandover, the poem that would rewrite Merrill's identity as a poet of epic scope and vision. The schoolmaster in Sandover's classroom and a central figure in the composition and narrative of the poem, was Auden.Less
This chapter discusses Auden's influence on James Merrill. It suggests that Merrill looked to Auden as the guide who could instruct him and encourage him to enjoy the feast of the full range of poetic modes. Merrill would later begin that instruction, starting work on a new project that would aim to unite craft and sentiment, aesthetics and engagement, and whose vast ambition would more than encompass “what it all means, and what his neighbor feels.” That project was The Changing Light at Sandover, the poem that would rewrite Merrill's identity as a poet of epic scope and vision. The schoolmaster in Sandover's classroom and a central figure in the composition and narrative of the poem, was Auden.
Andrew Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195181005
- eISBN:
- 9780199851010
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195181005.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Despite the deep-seated notion that the archetypal American poet sings a solitary “Song of Myself,” much of the most enduring American poetry has actually been preoccupied with friendship and its ...
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Despite the deep-seated notion that the archetypal American poet sings a solitary “Song of Myself,” much of the most enduring American poetry has actually been preoccupied with friendship and its pleasures, contradictions, and discontents. This book examines this obsession with the problems and paradoxes of friendship, tracing its eruption in the New American Poetry that emerges after World War II as a potent avant-garde movement. The book argues that a clash between friendship and non-conformity is central to post-war American poetry and its development. By focusing on some of the most important and influential postmodernist American poets, the book offers a new interpretation of the peculiar dynamics of American avant-garde poetic communities and the role of the individual within them. At the same time, this study challenges both the reductive critiques of American individualism and the idealized, heavily biographical celebrations of literary camaraderie one finds in much critical discussion. The book foregrounds a fundamental paradox: that at the heart of experimental American poetry pulses a commitment to individualism and dynamic movement that runs directly counter to an equally profound devotion to avant-garde collaboration and community. It demonstrates that this tense dialectic between an aversion to conformity and a poetics of friendship actually energizes post-war American poetry, drives the creation, meaning, and form of important poems, frames the interrelationships between certain key poets, and leaves contemporary writers with a complicated legacy to negotiate.Less
Despite the deep-seated notion that the archetypal American poet sings a solitary “Song of Myself,” much of the most enduring American poetry has actually been preoccupied with friendship and its pleasures, contradictions, and discontents. This book examines this obsession with the problems and paradoxes of friendship, tracing its eruption in the New American Poetry that emerges after World War II as a potent avant-garde movement. The book argues that a clash between friendship and non-conformity is central to post-war American poetry and its development. By focusing on some of the most important and influential postmodernist American poets, the book offers a new interpretation of the peculiar dynamics of American avant-garde poetic communities and the role of the individual within them. At the same time, this study challenges both the reductive critiques of American individualism and the idealized, heavily biographical celebrations of literary camaraderie one finds in much critical discussion. The book foregrounds a fundamental paradox: that at the heart of experimental American poetry pulses a commitment to individualism and dynamic movement that runs directly counter to an equally profound devotion to avant-garde collaboration and community. It demonstrates that this tense dialectic between an aversion to conformity and a poetics of friendship actually energizes post-war American poetry, drives the creation, meaning, and form of important poems, frames the interrelationships between certain key poets, and leaves contemporary writers with a complicated legacy to negotiate.
Dorothy J. Wang
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780804783651
- eISBN:
- 9780804789097
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804783651.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter begins with analysis of the critical controversy that erupted when poet John Yau criticized Eliot Weinberger’s anthology, American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders for its ...
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This chapter begins with analysis of the critical controversy that erupted when poet John Yau criticized Eliot Weinberger’s anthology, American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders for its paucity of poets of color (only Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka were represented in the book). Weinberger charged Yau with only playing the ’race card’ when it was expedient and profitable. Contra Weinberger, this chapter shows that, far from shying away from the topic of race and identity, Yau has dealt with these concerns throughout his career in more oblique, often nonthematic, means. Because critics such as Weinberger tend to look only for thematic manifestations of ’Asianness,’ they have missed Yau’s more subtle, non-content-based grappling with issues of racial identity, including racial self-hatred, and his critiques of racist representations and discourses.Less
This chapter begins with analysis of the critical controversy that erupted when poet John Yau criticized Eliot Weinberger’s anthology, American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders for its paucity of poets of color (only Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka were represented in the book). Weinberger charged Yau with only playing the ’race card’ when it was expedient and profitable. Contra Weinberger, this chapter shows that, far from shying away from the topic of race and identity, Yau has dealt with these concerns throughout his career in more oblique, often nonthematic, means. Because critics such as Weinberger tend to look only for thematic manifestations of ’Asianness,’ they have missed Yau’s more subtle, non-content-based grappling with issues of racial identity, including racial self-hatred, and his critiques of racist representations and discourses.
Andrew Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195181005
- eISBN:
- 9780199851010
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195181005.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
The supreme importance of turning away—and its centrality to the definition of poetry itself—speaks volumes about Amiri Baraka's poetics and the course of his volatile, controversial career. The ...
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The supreme importance of turning away—and its centrality to the definition of poetry itself—speaks volumes about Amiri Baraka's poetics and the course of his volatile, controversial career. The strenuous effort to push off from whatever has moved him, at whatever cost, is truly the soul of Baraka's work. Baraka's emphasis on “turning away” closely resembles the idea of “abandonment” so important to the brand of radical, experimental individualism that begins with Ralph Waldo Emerson and energizes the New American Poetry of Baraka and his compatriots. Baraka's relationship with the white avant-garde community is not, as most accounts have it, a simple case of a young, confused African-American poet desperately searching for his “true” voice, eventually triumphing by shedding his white friends and their way of writing and at last arriving at a more political and “blacker” art.Less
The supreme importance of turning away—and its centrality to the definition of poetry itself—speaks volumes about Amiri Baraka's poetics and the course of his volatile, controversial career. The strenuous effort to push off from whatever has moved him, at whatever cost, is truly the soul of Baraka's work. Baraka's emphasis on “turning away” closely resembles the idea of “abandonment” so important to the brand of radical, experimental individualism that begins with Ralph Waldo Emerson and energizes the New American Poetry of Baraka and his compatriots. Baraka's relationship with the white avant-garde community is not, as most accounts have it, a simple case of a young, confused African-American poet desperately searching for his “true” voice, eventually triumphing by shedding his white friends and their way of writing and at last arriving at a more political and “blacker” art.
Jesse Zuba
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691164472
- eISBN:
- 9781400873791
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691164472.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
“We have many poets of the First Book,” the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but ...
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“We have many poets of the First Book,” the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but also had come to define it. Surveying American poetry over the past hundred years, this book explores the emergence of the poetic debut as a unique literary production with its own tradition, conventions, and dynamic role in the literary market. Through new readings of ranging from Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore to John Ashbery and Louise Glück, the book illuminates the importance of the first book in twentieth-century American literary culture, which involved complex struggles for legitimacy on the part of poets, critics, and publishers alike. The book investigates poets' diverse responses to the question of how to launch a career in an increasingly professionalized literary scene that threatened the authenticity of the poetic calling. It shows how modernist debuts evoke markedly idiosyncratic paths, while postwar first books evoke trajectories that balance professional imperatives with traditional literary ideals. Debut titles ranging from Simpson's The Arrivistes to Ken Chen's Juvenilia stress the strikingly pervasive theme of beginning, accommodating a new demand for career development even as it distances the poets from that demand. Combining literary analysis with cultural history, this book will interest scholars and students of twentieth-century literature as well as readers and writers of poetry.Less
“We have many poets of the First Book,” the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but also had come to define it. Surveying American poetry over the past hundred years, this book explores the emergence of the poetic debut as a unique literary production with its own tradition, conventions, and dynamic role in the literary market. Through new readings of ranging from Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore to John Ashbery and Louise Glück, the book illuminates the importance of the first book in twentieth-century American literary culture, which involved complex struggles for legitimacy on the part of poets, critics, and publishers alike. The book investigates poets' diverse responses to the question of how to launch a career in an increasingly professionalized literary scene that threatened the authenticity of the poetic calling. It shows how modernist debuts evoke markedly idiosyncratic paths, while postwar first books evoke trajectories that balance professional imperatives with traditional literary ideals. Debut titles ranging from Simpson's The Arrivistes to Ken Chen's Juvenilia stress the strikingly pervasive theme of beginning, accommodating a new demand for career development even as it distances the poets from that demand. Combining literary analysis with cultural history, this book will interest scholars and students of twentieth-century literature as well as readers and writers of poetry.
Jonathan Stalling
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823231447
- eISBN:
- 9780823241835
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823231447.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This book uncovers an important untold history by tracing the historically specific, intertextual pathways of a single, if polyvalent, philosophical term, emptiness, as it is transformed within ...
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This book uncovers an important untold history by tracing the historically specific, intertextual pathways of a single, if polyvalent, philosophical term, emptiness, as it is transformed within twentieth-century American poetry and poetics. This conceptual migration is detailed in two sections. The first focuses on “transpacific Buddhist poetics,” while the second maps the less well-known terrain of “transpacific Daoist poetics.” In Chapters 1 and 2, the text explores Ernest Fenollosa's “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” as an expression of Fenollosa's distinctly Buddhist poetics informed by a two-decade-long encounter with a culturally hybrid form of Buddhism known as Shin Bukkyo (“New Buddhism”). Chapter 2 explores the classical Chinese poetics that undergirds the lost half of Fenellosa's essay. Chapter 3 concludes the first half of the book with an exploration of the didactic and soteriological function of “emptiness” in Gary Snyder's influential poetry and poetics. The second half begins with a critical exploration of the three-decades-long career of the poet/translator/critic Wai-lim Yip, whose “transpacific Daoist poetics” has been an important fixture in American poetic late modernism and has begun to gain wider notoriety in China. The last chapter engages the intertextual weave of poststructural thought and Daoist and shamanistic discourses in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's important body of heterocultural productions. By formulating interpretive frames as hybrid as the texts being read, this book makes available one of the most important yet still largely unknown stories of American poetry and poetics.Less
This book uncovers an important untold history by tracing the historically specific, intertextual pathways of a single, if polyvalent, philosophical term, emptiness, as it is transformed within twentieth-century American poetry and poetics. This conceptual migration is detailed in two sections. The first focuses on “transpacific Buddhist poetics,” while the second maps the less well-known terrain of “transpacific Daoist poetics.” In Chapters 1 and 2, the text explores Ernest Fenollosa's “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” as an expression of Fenollosa's distinctly Buddhist poetics informed by a two-decade-long encounter with a culturally hybrid form of Buddhism known as Shin Bukkyo (“New Buddhism”). Chapter 2 explores the classical Chinese poetics that undergirds the lost half of Fenellosa's essay. Chapter 3 concludes the first half of the book with an exploration of the didactic and soteriological function of “emptiness” in Gary Snyder's influential poetry and poetics. The second half begins with a critical exploration of the three-decades-long career of the poet/translator/critic Wai-lim Yip, whose “transpacific Daoist poetics” has been an important fixture in American poetic late modernism and has begun to gain wider notoriety in China. The last chapter engages the intertextual weave of poststructural thought and Daoist and shamanistic discourses in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's important body of heterocultural productions. By formulating interpretive frames as hybrid as the texts being read, this book makes available one of the most important yet still largely unknown stories of American poetry and poetics.
Andrew Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195181005
- eISBN:
- 9780199851010
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195181005.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This book has examined a vision of poetry that icontinually turns away from and returns to group affiliations and assimilation—from the experimental poetics of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri ...
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This book has examined a vision of poetry that icontinually turns away from and returns to group affiliations and assimilation—from the experimental poetics of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka and their contemporaries. The postwar avant-garde New American Poetry and the various tributaries that flow from it, among them Language poetry, establish poetry as a unique forum in which to negotiate the paradoxes of affiliation, assimilation, friendship, and personal autonomy. By continuously confronting in memorable words and metaphors its philosophical, psychological, social, and poetic quandaries, post-war American poetry demonstrates that friendship is surely one of the most curious of human phenomena, one that Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly calls a “paradox in nature.” From the 19th century to the present moment, some of the most vibrant, most enduring American writing has attempted to shed light on this infinitely rich relation, this knotty oxymoron so central to cultural narratives, literature, and people's lives.Less
This book has examined a vision of poetry that icontinually turns away from and returns to group affiliations and assimilation—from the experimental poetics of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka and their contemporaries. The postwar avant-garde New American Poetry and the various tributaries that flow from it, among them Language poetry, establish poetry as a unique forum in which to negotiate the paradoxes of affiliation, assimilation, friendship, and personal autonomy. By continuously confronting in memorable words and metaphors its philosophical, psychological, social, and poetic quandaries, post-war American poetry demonstrates that friendship is surely one of the most curious of human phenomena, one that Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly calls a “paradox in nature.” From the 19th century to the present moment, some of the most vibrant, most enduring American writing has attempted to shed light on this infinitely rich relation, this knotty oxymoron so central to cultural narratives, literature, and people's lives.
John Timberman Newcomb
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252036798
- eISBN:
- 9780252093906
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252036798.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter examines how the New Verse movement achieved spectacular success by focusing on the role played by Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, particularly in creating a space for contemporary American ...
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This chapter examines how the New Verse movement achieved spectacular success by focusing on the role played by Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, particularly in creating a space for contemporary American verse where none had been. Poetry, founded by Harriet Monroe in Chicago in 1912, exemplifies the productive intersection between twentieth-century artistic avant-gardes and the forces of modern disciplinary specialization. This chapter looks at how Monroe and others forged Poetry's identity through antagonistic opposition to such “standpatters” as the “quality magazines,” transforming it into a pioneering endeavor in the rhetorical self-fashioning of a twentieth-century American avant-gardism. It also considers Poetry's feud with The Dial, which still saw poetry as an instrument of moral uplift that was now menaced by what it called “Futurism.” Finally, it discusses Poetry's advocacy of institutional support for contemporary poets, and especially how it reformulated central concepts of literary value—genius, masterpiece, tradition, form, audience—into a forceful poetics of avant-garde progressivism. The chapter argues that Poetry's avant-garde experiments have a transformative impact upon American poetry, and literary culture more generally.Less
This chapter examines how the New Verse movement achieved spectacular success by focusing on the role played by Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, particularly in creating a space for contemporary American verse where none had been. Poetry, founded by Harriet Monroe in Chicago in 1912, exemplifies the productive intersection between twentieth-century artistic avant-gardes and the forces of modern disciplinary specialization. This chapter looks at how Monroe and others forged Poetry's identity through antagonistic opposition to such “standpatters” as the “quality magazines,” transforming it into a pioneering endeavor in the rhetorical self-fashioning of a twentieth-century American avant-gardism. It also considers Poetry's feud with The Dial, which still saw poetry as an instrument of moral uplift that was now menaced by what it called “Futurism.” Finally, it discusses Poetry's advocacy of institutional support for contemporary poets, and especially how it reformulated central concepts of literary value—genius, masterpiece, tradition, form, audience—into a forceful poetics of avant-garde progressivism. The chapter argues that Poetry's avant-garde experiments have a transformative impact upon American poetry, and literary culture more generally.
