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.
Natalie Pollard
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- July 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198852605
- eISBN:
- 9780191887024
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198852605.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Chapter 3 focuses on patronage, passivity, and the politics of poetic reception in the mid-twentieth-century work of F.T. Prince. It examines the motives for his trans-historical engagement with ...
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Chapter 3 focuses on patronage, passivity, and the politics of poetic reception in the mid-twentieth-century work of F.T. Prince. It examines the motives for his trans-historical engagement with Michelangelo’s sculpture and poetry, and allies the motifs of stasis and the statue that comes to life with the condition of being roused from (readerly) repose. Re-awakening his forebear’s material, Prince’s lyric forms are closely attuned to the politics and economics of the situated, commissioned (and compromised) cultural work, even as it emphasizes how the neglected statue, dormant artistic legacy, or underappreciated poem can be transformed in a new era, for a fresh audience. Chapter 3 both examines the negotiations at play in contemporary reactivations of earlier models of commission and reception, resistance and slumber, and considers the ethics of the quietly fugitive provocation in the twentieth-century poetry industry.Less
Chapter 3 focuses on patronage, passivity, and the politics of poetic reception in the mid-twentieth-century work of F.T. Prince. It examines the motives for his trans-historical engagement with Michelangelo’s sculpture and poetry, and allies the motifs of stasis and the statue that comes to life with the condition of being roused from (readerly) repose. Re-awakening his forebear’s material, Prince’s lyric forms are closely attuned to the politics and economics of the situated, commissioned (and compromised) cultural work, even as it emphasizes how the neglected statue, dormant artistic legacy, or underappreciated poem can be transformed in a new era, for a fresh audience. Chapter 3 both examines the negotiations at play in contemporary reactivations of earlier models of commission and reception, resistance and slumber, and considers the ethics of the quietly fugitive provocation in the twentieth-century poetry industry.
Alison Garden
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781789621815
- eISBN:
- 9781800341678
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789621815.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The final chapter is concerned with the enormous number of poets that have responded to Casement. Beginning with poetry written by Casement’s close friend and intellectual companion, Eva Gore-Booth, ...
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The final chapter is concerned with the enormous number of poets that have responded to Casement. Beginning with poetry written by Casement’s close friend and intellectual companion, Eva Gore-Booth, this chapter discusses a range of poetry from throughout the twentieth century. As the chapter illustrates, this poetry depicts Casement in various guises, from the tragic nationalist hero of 1916 in Gore-Booth; to a man wronged and shamed by the British in Yeats’ poems from the late 1930s; to a symbol critiquing regressive U.S. politics and troubled transatlantic relations in Paul Muldoon’s ‘A Clear Signal’. This chapter traces how, throughout the twentieth century, we see poets begin to view the nebulous nature of Casement’s multiple and shifting allegiances as enabling, rather than anxiety inducing, and poets like Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian mobilise Casement as a hopeful symbol of plurality.Less
The final chapter is concerned with the enormous number of poets that have responded to Casement. Beginning with poetry written by Casement’s close friend and intellectual companion, Eva Gore-Booth, this chapter discusses a range of poetry from throughout the twentieth century. As the chapter illustrates, this poetry depicts Casement in various guises, from the tragic nationalist hero of 1916 in Gore-Booth; to a man wronged and shamed by the British in Yeats’ poems from the late 1930s; to a symbol critiquing regressive U.S. politics and troubled transatlantic relations in Paul Muldoon’s ‘A Clear Signal’. This chapter traces how, throughout the twentieth century, we see poets begin to view the nebulous nature of Casement’s multiple and shifting allegiances as enabling, rather than anxiety inducing, and poets like Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian mobilise Casement as a hopeful symbol of plurality.
David Gewanter
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226890432
- eISBN:
- 9780226890371
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226890371.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
How can the body find ecstasy? How can it survive it? For some Romantic poets, moments of bliss may come to a solitary explorer who “wanders lonely as a cloud,” then finds a new flower or ocean. Yet ...
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How can the body find ecstasy? How can it survive it? For some Romantic poets, moments of bliss may come to a solitary explorer who “wanders lonely as a cloud,” then finds a new flower or ocean. Yet the obdurate materials and boundaries of Thom Gunn's urban world resist such moments of sensation and access, and the simple naturalism of first-person change. His boyhood home of postwar London is the gray city of Dickens, not Keats; his second home of San Francisco, though streaked with Ginsberg's hallucinogenic “Blake-light,” is still plagued by Blake's “mind-forged manacles” and “harlot's cry.” In postwar America, other poets of Gunn's generation sought bliss in drugs, drink, and flesh; but whether through Ginsberg's “Blake-light tragedies” or Robert Lowell's dramas of mania and incarceration, they put the primacy of individual vision before such stable observations of the social world as Gunn's unfevered and unsentimental poetry shows. His work provides, then, a brave alternative to some of twentieth-century poetry's muddy experiments in “personhood.”Less
How can the body find ecstasy? How can it survive it? For some Romantic poets, moments of bliss may come to a solitary explorer who “wanders lonely as a cloud,” then finds a new flower or ocean. Yet the obdurate materials and boundaries of Thom Gunn's urban world resist such moments of sensation and access, and the simple naturalism of first-person change. His boyhood home of postwar London is the gray city of Dickens, not Keats; his second home of San Francisco, though streaked with Ginsberg's hallucinogenic “Blake-light,” is still plagued by Blake's “mind-forged manacles” and “harlot's cry.” In postwar America, other poets of Gunn's generation sought bliss in drugs, drink, and flesh; but whether through Ginsberg's “Blake-light tragedies” or Robert Lowell's dramas of mania and incarceration, they put the primacy of individual vision before such stable observations of the social world as Gunn's unfevered and unsentimental poetry shows. His work provides, then, a brave alternative to some of twentieth-century poetry's muddy experiments in “personhood.”
Hugh Haughton
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748681327
- eISBN:
- 9781474422239
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748681327.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This chapter explores poets’ letters as ‘an art form’ in the post-Romantic period, exploring the bearing of poets’ letters on their poems (and vice versa). It reflects on the key role played by ...
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This chapter explores poets’ letters as ‘an art form’ in the post-Romantic period, exploring the bearing of poets’ letters on their poems (and vice versa). It reflects on the key role played by epistolary dialogue in the creation and circulation of poetry in the modern period, documenting the ways poets first launched poems in letters to friends, and used letters to sketch out their ideas about poetry and poetics. It comment on the practice of a number of nineteenth-century poets who used letters to launch ideas about their poetry (including Keats, the Brownings, Hopkins and Emily Dickinson), before moving on to consider the equally crucial role of correspondence in the work of twentieth-century poets (including Bishop, Lowell, Marianne Moore, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Philip Larkin). In offering a survey of this broad epistolary territory, it also outlines an idea of an epistolary poetics.Less
This chapter explores poets’ letters as ‘an art form’ in the post-Romantic period, exploring the bearing of poets’ letters on their poems (and vice versa). It reflects on the key role played by epistolary dialogue in the creation and circulation of poetry in the modern period, documenting the ways poets first launched poems in letters to friends, and used letters to sketch out their ideas about poetry and poetics. It comment on the practice of a number of nineteenth-century poets who used letters to launch ideas about their poetry (including Keats, the Brownings, Hopkins and Emily Dickinson), before moving on to consider the equally crucial role of correspondence in the work of twentieth-century poets (including Bishop, Lowell, Marianne Moore, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Philip Larkin). In offering a survey of this broad epistolary territory, it also outlines an idea of an epistolary poetics.
Edna Longley
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748681327
- eISBN:
- 9781474422239
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748681327.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This chapter takes a psychological approach to the letters of Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin; and to the relation between their letters and their poems. The main focus is on Thomas’s correspondence ...
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This chapter takes a psychological approach to the letters of Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin; and to the relation between their letters and their poems. The main focus is on Thomas’s correspondence with the poet and playwright Gordon Bottomley (an invalid, who lived in the Lake District); and on Larkin’s letters to his lover Monica Jones. The chief ground for comparison is that both Thomas and Larkin are lyric poets, whose letters can be read as rehearsals for poetic psychodrama. The word ‘psychotherapy’ suggests that they write letters which seek relief from inner distress, and which may themselves relieve it.Less
This chapter takes a psychological approach to the letters of Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin; and to the relation between their letters and their poems. The main focus is on Thomas’s correspondence with the poet and playwright Gordon Bottomley (an invalid, who lived in the Lake District); and on Larkin’s letters to his lover Monica Jones. The chief ground for comparison is that both Thomas and Larkin are lyric poets, whose letters can be read as rehearsals for poetic psychodrama. The word ‘psychotherapy’ suggests that they write letters which seek relief from inner distress, and which may themselves relieve it.
Elizabeth C. Russ
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781683400387
- eISBN:
- 9781683400653
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9781683400387.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
Chapter 5 argues that although Haiti's presence is relatively absent in much of Aída Cartagena Portalatín’s work, when Haiti is visible, it signals an important transformation in Cartagena's thinking ...
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Chapter 5 argues that although Haiti's presence is relatively absent in much of Aída Cartagena Portalatín’s work, when Haiti is visible, it signals an important transformation in Cartagena's thinking about Dominican national identity; Russ shows that Cartagena eventually breaks loose from the discursive structures that define Dominican nationalism in twentieth-century Dominican literature and twentieth-century Dominican poetry as fundamentally anti-black and anti-Haitian.Less
Chapter 5 argues that although Haiti's presence is relatively absent in much of Aída Cartagena Portalatín’s work, when Haiti is visible, it signals an important transformation in Cartagena's thinking about Dominican national identity; Russ shows that Cartagena eventually breaks loose from the discursive structures that define Dominican nationalism in twentieth-century Dominican literature and twentieth-century Dominican poetry as fundamentally anti-black and anti-Haitian.
Siobhan Phillips
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748681327
- eISBN:
- 9781474422239
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748681327.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
Lorine Niedecker’s poetry is only beginning to garner the critical attention it deserves. From the 1930s to the 1970s, she wrote lyrics whose force and influence belie her ostensible ...
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Lorine Niedecker’s poetry is only beginning to garner the critical attention it deserves. From the 1930s to the 1970s, she wrote lyrics whose force and influence belie her ostensible position—literally and figuratively—on the outskirts of the literary world. Accounts of Niedecker’s work are incomplete, however, without analysis of her epistolarity. Niedecker needed correspondence to keep in touch with the friends and mentors of her literary life, sending notes, drafts, comments and questions from her home in Wisconsin to her peers in New York or Japan. But Niedecker also used correspondence to develop a model of writing that defined her singularity among such peers.Less
Lorine Niedecker’s poetry is only beginning to garner the critical attention it deserves. From the 1930s to the 1970s, she wrote lyrics whose force and influence belie her ostensible position—literally and figuratively—on the outskirts of the literary world. Accounts of Niedecker’s work are incomplete, however, without analysis of her epistolarity. Niedecker needed correspondence to keep in touch with the friends and mentors of her literary life, sending notes, drafts, comments and questions from her home in Wisconsin to her peers in New York or Japan. But Niedecker also used correspondence to develop a model of writing that defined her singularity among such peers.
Angela Leighton
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748681327
- eISBN:
- 9781474422239
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748681327.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This chapter looks at W. S. Graham’s many wonderful letters to those contemporaries, painters and artists of the St Ives school, who shared his ideals, but who also often remain distant, idealised ...
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This chapter looks at W. S. Graham’s many wonderful letters to those contemporaries, painters and artists of the St Ives school, who shared his ideals, but who also often remain distant, idealised correspondents—sounding-boards for the poet’s preoccupations. It examines, in particular, how these letters become practice grounds for poetry, allowing Graham to try out his epistolary poetic style in prose—prose which half-invents both self and other, as it searches the distances between the speaker and his notional, half-imaginary correspondent. The sheer musicality of these letters shows the extent to which Graham is really writing for himself, and sounding out the phrases that will then become part of his poetry.Less
This chapter looks at W. S. Graham’s many wonderful letters to those contemporaries, painters and artists of the St Ives school, who shared his ideals, but who also often remain distant, idealised correspondents—sounding-boards for the poet’s preoccupations. It examines, in particular, how these letters become practice grounds for poetry, allowing Graham to try out his epistolary poetic style in prose—prose which half-invents both self and other, as it searches the distances between the speaker and his notional, half-imaginary correspondent. The sheer musicality of these letters shows the extent to which Graham is really writing for himself, and sounding out the phrases that will then become part of his poetry.
Matthew Campbell
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748681327
- eISBN:
- 9781474422239
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748681327.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
Much scholarship has been devoted to the extraordinary experience of W.B. Yeats and his wife George on their honeymoon, when she acted as medium for the writing dictated by the spirits who came, they ...
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Much scholarship has been devoted to the extraordinary experience of W.B. Yeats and his wife George on their honeymoon, when she acted as medium for the writing dictated by the spirits who came, they told Yeats, ‘to give you metaphors for poetry.’ Much has been made of Yeats’s adoption of the revealed symbolic system as it emerged into his subsequent poetry. And much has also been said about the sexual politics of the relationship between Yeats and George and the other women in his life, like Maud Gonne or Lady Gregory and their various functions from muse to patron. This chapter thinks again about these writers as correspondents with the poetry, as historical persons, amatory fantasies, spiritual personae and psychic practitioners. It focuses on George, though, and gives another version of Yeats the collaborator, the poet of correspondences: ‘Where got I that truth?’, the two-part lyric ‘Fragments’ asks: ‘Out of a medium’s mouth’ is the answer.Less
Much scholarship has been devoted to the extraordinary experience of W.B. Yeats and his wife George on their honeymoon, when she acted as medium for the writing dictated by the spirits who came, they told Yeats, ‘to give you metaphors for poetry.’ Much has been made of Yeats’s adoption of the revealed symbolic system as it emerged into his subsequent poetry. And much has also been said about the sexual politics of the relationship between Yeats and George and the other women in his life, like Maud Gonne or Lady Gregory and their various functions from muse to patron. This chapter thinks again about these writers as correspondents with the poetry, as historical persons, amatory fantasies, spiritual personae and psychic practitioners. It focuses on George, though, and gives another version of Yeats the collaborator, the poet of correspondences: ‘Where got I that truth?’, the two-part lyric ‘Fragments’ asks: ‘Out of a medium’s mouth’ is the answer.
Stephen Ross
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198708568
- eISBN:
- 9780191779527
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198708568.003.0018
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Poetry
Throughout his career, and increasingly in the later work, John Ashbery has maintained a vibrant dialogue with the English nonsense tradition. Edward Lear in particular has accompanied Ashbery from ...
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Throughout his career, and increasingly in the later work, John Ashbery has maintained a vibrant dialogue with the English nonsense tradition. Edward Lear in particular has accompanied Ashbery from the start as a crucial interlocutor. This essay surveys some of the highlights of that conversation, focusing on Ashbery’s early, macabre rewriting of ‘How Pleasant To Know Mr. Lear!’ and later, lighter engagement with poems such as ‘The Four Little Children Who Went Around the World’ and ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’. What continuously draws Ashbery to Lear is his genius for the ‘pleasant surprise’, which Ashbery has called ‘the one essential ingredient for great art’. Long read after the modernist lights of figures such as Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden, Ashbery enjoys an equally strong affinity to Lear and his ‘ludicrously whirligig’ art of sudden shifts.Less
Throughout his career, and increasingly in the later work, John Ashbery has maintained a vibrant dialogue with the English nonsense tradition. Edward Lear in particular has accompanied Ashbery from the start as a crucial interlocutor. This essay surveys some of the highlights of that conversation, focusing on Ashbery’s early, macabre rewriting of ‘How Pleasant To Know Mr. Lear!’ and later, lighter engagement with poems such as ‘The Four Little Children Who Went Around the World’ and ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’. What continuously draws Ashbery to Lear is his genius for the ‘pleasant surprise’, which Ashbery has called ‘the one essential ingredient for great art’. Long read after the modernist lights of figures such as Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden, Ashbery enjoys an equally strong affinity to Lear and his ‘ludicrously whirligig’ art of sudden shifts.
Jonathan Ellis
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748681327
- eISBN:
- 9781474422239
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748681327.003.0015
- Subject:
- Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This chapter looks at the discourse of last letters in the writing of poets such as John Keats, Elizabeth Bishop and Ted Hughes. In particular, it scrutinises the close relationship of the ‘last ...
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This chapter looks at the discourse of last letters in the writing of poets such as John Keats, Elizabeth Bishop and Ted Hughes. In particular, it scrutinises the close relationship of the ‘last letter’ to aesthetic and theoretical debates about the permanence of art over life, mind over matter, writing over speech. The chapter also addresses the elegiac strain in late twentieth-century letter writing, the sense among many poets that they are the very last letter writers.Less
This chapter looks at the discourse of last letters in the writing of poets such as John Keats, Elizabeth Bishop and Ted Hughes. In particular, it scrutinises the close relationship of the ‘last letter’ to aesthetic and theoretical debates about the permanence of art over life, mind over matter, writing over speech. The chapter also addresses the elegiac strain in late twentieth-century letter writing, the sense among many poets that they are the very last letter writers.
Paul Muldoon
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748681327
- eISBN:
- 9781474422239
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748681327.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This chapter offers a close reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Armadillo’ and Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ in the light of the recently published letters between the two poets, as well as Bishop’s ...
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This chapter offers a close reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Armadillo’ and Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ in the light of the recently published letters between the two poets, as well as Bishop’s correspondence with The New Yorker. It looks at letters as ‘the other life that [a poem] might have had’ and a poem as ‘the other life that [letters’ might have had’, concluding that the relationship between Lowell and Bishop was often less benign than we’ve led ourselves to believe.Less
This chapter offers a close reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Armadillo’ and Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ in the light of the recently published letters between the two poets, as well as Bishop’s correspondence with The New Yorker. It looks at letters as ‘the other life that [a poem] might have had’ and a poem as ‘the other life that [letters’ might have had’, concluding that the relationship between Lowell and Bishop was often less benign than we’ve led ourselves to believe.