Search

Critics often present Eliot as a poet who emphasizes subjective states or moods as concrete elements of a readily delineable interiority. Such a view suggests that Eliot perceives inwardness as a stable, substantive essence constitutive of individuals' sense of self. But to essentialize the self in this way necessarily constructs an oppositional relation between the self (the inner) and the "reality" external to that self (the outer). However, as his graduate work in philosophy and social theory makes clear, Eliot in fact perceives interiority and exteriority in mutually constitutive dialectical tension with one another. Neither term exists in isolation; each roots itself constitutively in relation to the other. Eliot's poetry from this early period reflects these views as well. In "Portrait of a Lady," one of his first mature poems, Eliot portrays subjectivity dialectically, as a product of subject/object interrelations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frank Stanford was an Arkansas-based poet who produced a substantial corpus of poetry through the 1970s. His best-known work, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (1977), narrates the ways that mass media technologies and state infrastructures shaped regionalism and social structure in the post-1945 rural US South. The afterlife of Stanford's writing has been subject to its own form of mediation: from Stanford's death in 1978 up until the present, a cult following has kept his work in print through communal practices—trading photocopied manuscripts, participating in marathon readings of Battlefield, and organizing Frank Stanford festivals. While the aura surrounding Stanford has often disassociated him from the structures and communities that shaped his writing, both his work and its legacy disclose the institutional, mediatic, and infrastructural forms that enable rural avant-garde poetic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For just over a year in 1947-1948, Muriel Spark was editor of the prestigious but conservative "Poetry Review" in London, the journal of the Poetry Society. This made her the only female editor of a little magazine in Britain at the time, and one of the very few in the English-speaking world. Her editorship was short-lived, apparently because her preference for modernist poetry and her policy of publishing new writers offended many of the Society's members. In this paper I look more closely at Spark's innovative editorship and the reasons it came to a premature end, drawing on a reading of the magazine and also on the Spark archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the structurally and thematically elaborate novel Memories of the Future (2019), Siri Hustvedt foregrounds the relationship between poetry and the novel. Two poets stand out as especially important to matters of plot, theme, and narrative: the modernist avant-garde poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and the New York School poet John Ashbery. These poets belong to different, but similarly pivotal moments in the evolution of American literature, one being a prescient—now recognized as iconic—modernist and the other an established, leading postmodernist. Despite their many differences, their output within poetry and the arts point to a collage aesthetics that provides a new way of probing the relationship between poetry and prose, as well as to a focus on the Bakhtinian notions of dialogism, polyphony, and voice, which inform the novel's structure and themes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though actively involved in leftist causes and committees throughout the 1930s, William Carlos Williams had an almost uncanny knack for getting between warring factions and alienating power centers of the Left, particularly "Partisan Review." This paper examines three such incidents: two in which PR intentionally humiliated the poet in 1936-37, and one in which Williams joined, signed petitions, then resigned from several leftist splinter groups battling each other in 1939. Among the reasons considered for these mishaps are: Williams's political naïveté about factionalism and editorial good faith; his skepticism regarding communism; his desire to be published in the leading leftist magazines; and the byzantine political alignments of the late 1930s. Ironically, Williams's own poetry and fiction in the 1930s show a genuine empathy (without cant or cliché) for the working class—a quality that was more talked about than achieved in leftist circles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poetic diaries kept by Gertrude Stein and Harryette Mullen, neither originally intended for publication, offer insight into an unexplored aspect of the diary as literary form: the genre's diurnality (or dailiness) as a shape governed more by seasonal and bodily cycles than by time as measured by clocks or calendars. Mullen has at times responded to Stein as a problematic modernist predecessor, but these two diaries do not engage in direct dialogue. Rather, as Stein's diary encodes the lesbian relationship at the heart of her domestic life and Mullen's diary participates in a newly recovered tradition of African American nature writing, both poets find a welcoming home for subtext in the diurnal rhythms and stylistic conventions of diary form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence suggests that Sylvia Plath encountered, paid attention to, and made use of eighteenth-century Augustan literature, but little scholarly attention has been paid to this territory of her reading. This article is primarily concerned with the complex (and at times reciprocal) relationship that exists between Plath's personal interest in Augustan literature and that literature's wider post-war critical reception. Looking at her annotated anthology of eighteenth-century verse (among other pieces of evidence), this article considers the ways in which Plath encountered and made sense of eighteenth-century Augustan literature, and then considers the extent to which that literature exerted a creative influence on Plath's own poetry. At the center of this discussion is "Gulliver," a direct response to Swift that, like so many of Plath's mock-heroic poems, is rarely examined either in itself or in relation to the mature poetry of Ariel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on contemporary long poems that use documentary sources, Michael Leong's Contested Records theorizes a genre he names "documental poetry." Taking a "cultural formalist" approach to these works, Leong brings rigorous attention to the forms, sources, and poetic activities of some of the most controversial recent poems including Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" and Kenneth Goldsmith's "The Body of Michael Brown." Ultimately, Leong uses documental poetry to argue persuasively about the nature, use, and relevance of poetry to social, political, and cultural life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CAConrad instructs readers to perform a range of private and public actions in the prose they publish as part of their (soma)tic poetry rituals. The poet has already performed these actions, and their poems document the results. Integrated with the poems, the instructions open out toward other possibilities, encouraging us to take notes on what we experience as we respond, while suggesting that our notes can serve as material for new poems. By combining poetry, documentation, and instructions in this way, the (soma)tics put pressure on models of interpretation that approach poems as bounded objects with determinate or determinable meanings. Conrad uses them to foreground the generative uncertainty of interpretive entanglement and shift aesthetic agency from poets to readers. Approached through Jacques Rancière's analysis of the politics of aesthetic experience and José Esteban Muñoz's conception of the emergent character of queer futurity, the (soma)tics offer more than merely the opportunity for readers to become poets. They challenge us to integrate the residues of poetic experience as we compose particular futures for ourselves and our communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Read in light of French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's How Natives Think (1910), Ezra Pound's comments on Chinese language and the color red in his ABC of Reading (1934) put him in a linguistic tradition that became known as "linguistic relativism," i.e. the idea that different languages and their structures in various ways affect their users' worldviews. So does his deployment of color terms in some of his poems. In fact, both Lévy-Bruhl and Pound, as well as Ernest Fenollosa, whose essay The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (written ca. 1903) Pound edited and published, can meaningfully be labeled linguistics relativists, rather than for example "Cratylists," which previously has been suggested in Pound's case. All in all, Lévy-Bruhl and Fenollosa aided Pound in chiseling out his specifically poetic version of linguistic relativism, as part of a project to counter abstraction by using concrete and vivid language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poet Stevie Smith wrote frequently about dogs, cats, and other creatures. Yet she has been virtually ignored within the field of literary animal studies. This oversight may be due to Smith's frivolous treatment of animals; however, the aesthetics of frivolity offer a valuable addition to animal studies' usual serious affective orientation. The cuteness, irreverence, and absurdity of Smith's pet poems are more than just markers of her trademark eccentric style. They are also an ethos. Against the forces of seriousness and utility, which drive the economies of cultural capital and actual capital, her animal poems assert the right of frivolous things—including animals and poems—to exist. Attending to Smith thus has payoffs not just for animal studies, but also for modernist poetics and affect studies, which are increasingly interested in the question of how it feels to be non-productive in an instrumentalist society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Grail Mass and Other Works by David Jones, editors Thomas Goldpaugh and Jamie Callison newly frame Jones's mid- to late-career poetry. Their extensive archival labor re-organizes the material collected in Jones's The Roman Quarry (1981), and supplements it with previously unpublished work, clarifying the context from which Jones's The Anathemata and The Sleeping Lord emerged. Goldpaugh and Callison provide an opportunity to consider how Jones's insistence on the fragmentary essence of his poems poses a significant challenge to influential critical ideas about the modern long poem as a genre. We are invited to question and re-think our expectations about poetic unity and coherence in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recovery of archival materials by and about Charles Olson for the University of New Mexico Press's Recencies series sets the stage for a critical reassessment of this midcentury American poet. Recent titles include his correspondences with fellow American writer Robert Duncan and British poet J.H. Prynne, a collection of Duncan's lectures on Olson, and ethnopoetic translator and writer Dennis Tedlock's posthumously published study of Olson's "Mayan Letters." Together, these works implicitly argue for the centrality of Olson's self-described projective verse poetics to Cold War poetry. They also compel a reimagining of what the term "projective verse" meant to both Olson and his compeers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lisa Goldfarb's Unexpected Affinities: Modern American Poetry and Symbolist Poetics adopts the rare one-to-many mode of poetic influence studies: it sets up a symbolist theory as the prism through which later modernistic poetic lights can pass and cross each other unexpectedly, converging while diverging. Through the central metaphor of Paul Valéry's pendulum of sound and sense, Goldfarb attempts to account for how the works of Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop have traveled back and forth between abstract thought and sensual impressions, creating a modern poetic music that is derived from modulations and variations rather than conventional metrical patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent poetry of the British neo-Modernist J. H. Prynne has often been characterized as an increasingly disparate and intractable body of work. Two poems from Prynne's collection Al-Dente (2014), "Reach Up" and "Morning," are approached here on the assumption that these are parts of a consistent poetic project. With a recourse to Wordsworthian transcendentalism and to Prynne's own critical prose, a tracing of the poems' embedded networks of eclectic references uncovers a potential organizing theme: the dialectic between existential continuity and corporeal mortality. In "Reach Up" the individual experience of the present moment, and its subsequent recollection within marked time, is a way of deflecting the ongoing reality of corporeal mortality. "Morning" extends this concern by questioning how self-experience and memory are communicated and absented via language, and by placing individual acts of remembrance within a wider historical ambit of human expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"[T]he bone-frame was made for / no such shock knit within terror": the first poem in H.D.'s The Walls Do Not Fall equates the human body to a bombed building, the word "frame" encapsulating the mutual implication of urban, human, and poetic structures in H.D.'s wartime poetry. In the writing of poets living and working in London during World War II, the civilian experience of war is not merely documented and alluded to; the Blitz also provides a pressing material reference to architectural metaphors used to figure poetic form. In the context of a number of wartime publications, civilian records, and postwar lyric theory, H.D's and T.S. Eliot's wartime works emerge as engaging with a number of such formal implications: the dissolution of architectural structures, the navigability of fragmented urban topographies, and patterns of continuity in the face of violently disrupted routines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reception of American poet George Oppen has been shaped by the understanding that he did not publish during the period between his volumes Discrete Series (1934) and The Materials (1962). Scholars debate and puzzle over the meaning of Oppen's early work in light of his decision to quit poetry for political work. The discovery of eight poems Oppen wrote in the mid-1930s, three of them published late in 1934—after Discrete Series —and five published here for the first time, expands our view of his career and its timeframe, his poetic technique, aesthetic imagination and politics around the time he apparently stopped writing for publication. Submitted to the obscure Westminster Magazine and Bozart-Westminster anthology in 1934 and likely 1935, the poems reveal a style influenced by Objectivist interlocuters while suggesting a break with first-generation modernist principles, developing the themes and forms of his later collections. Framed by three surviving letters to the critic T.C. Wilson, who co-edited Bozart-Westminster with Ezra Pound, the commitments and doubts of a young Oppen come into sharper focus in light of his historical moment and biographical circumstances, living in Brooklyn where he and partner Mary would join the Communist Party in 1935. These poems articulate their formal experiment in response to Depression-era American society, self-consciously using a language of political reality while refusing the habitual collapse of art and propaganda that Oppen diagnosed in "communist verse." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did Ezra Pound excise all material "re/ sound" from Ernest Fenollosa's landmark essay "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry"? Why does Pound fail to mention a second Fenollosa essay in which the deceased sinologist "discuss[es] the sound of Chinese verse"? Pound's editorial decision had the effect of heightening the silence of the Chinese ideogram. Through sustained close reading of the neglected 1912 Pound poem "Silet" ("He is silent"), it becomes clear that Pound's omissions from the Fenollosa lecture were motivated by an Imagist agenda to construct a poem of 'image and not sound." Pound's fascination with silence in the 1910s prefigures his eventual renunciation of speech in the final decades of his life, an event that contributed to an augmentation in his literary reputation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics have long debated the relation between poetry and propaganda. Recently, scholars of twentieth-century literature have analyzed the propaganda produced by poets in both verse and prose during the two world wars. But surprisingly little has been said about the way poets echoed specific propagandist phrases in their writing to subject them to scrutiny, draw out their implications, and examine their effects. Some of the most striking examples of this technique can be found in the work of Randall Jarrell, a poet who held unusually complex views on propaganda, and who sought to critically analyze (rather than simply enforce or reject) the readymade phrases deployed in public discourse during World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1939, the radio-dramatist Norman Corwin broadcast two poems by Sterling Brown on a special episode of CBS's Words Without Music dedicated to "Negro poetry." The circumstances of Corwin's radio adaptation reveal a specific dimension of Brown's achievement as a poet of black dialect that is difficult to apprehend on the printed page: the poetry's own constitutive relation to the media-ecological conditions of its making. Brown's poems can be said to resist the exclusionary terms of midcentury network broadcasting precisely insofar as they bear the latent traces of prior encounters with mass media. Formulated with regard to Brown and Corwin, the concept of latent remediation offers a means of grasping how a technologized soundscape can materially transform the formal protocols even of poems never destined for the airwaves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When T.S. Eliot adapted Murder in the Cathedral for CBS's "Columbia Workshop Series" in 1937, he cut out Thomas Becket's prose sermon in what was a reluctant incursion into radio drama. In so doing, Eliot was inexplicably doing away with the heart of the play. It is the sermon that makes effective the poetic victory of Becket's martyrdom by arbitrating between the Chorus's lyricism and the knight's murderous vernacular. For Eliot, the Anglican prose sermon at its best was "applied poetry." However, that Eliot's faith in the poetic powers of the prose sermon faltered in the CBS production of Murder in the Cathedral goes to show that he could not ultimately trust radio prose to do the poetic job he assigned verse on the page. Tragically, Eliot found refuge, henceforth, in writing verse drama for the stage that he could not be sure had any poetry in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Myung Mi Kim's poetry and poetics is grounded in the physical body. Mouths and throats abound in her poems, and the physical act of speaking is an important, and overlooked, dimension of her poetic practice. Poetry comes from the body as rhythm, sound, and breath, yet we have few resources for talking about further dimensions of the physicality of poetry, including the muscular and kinesthetic experience of words in the mouth. Recent work in cognitive science and sociolinguistics offers a useful supplement for more fully exploring the physical, and physiological, in Kim's poetry. Her poems are full of obdurate sounds and conjunctions of multiple languages that prompt for the reader new experiences of the mouth and tongue. Through such forms of resistance and play, Kim seeks to revitalize language as a form of connection and "commons." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lyn Hejinian's My Lifeand Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Dayboth articulate a domestic quotidian devoted to what Rita Felski in Doing Timecalls 'the repetitive tasks of social reproduction.' Mindful of the over-determined relationship between gender and the everyday, Hejinian and Mayer use the long poem to convey the elusive quotidian while engaging with its gendered associations. The exhaustive inclusions of Mayer's 'day' and the unexpected selections and juxtapositions of Hejinian's 'life' both use metonymy to represent a subversive poetics of the detail. Specifically, Hejinian reverses background and foreground, repeats phrases with shifting emphasis as analogue for the habits of everyday life, and defamiliarizes metonymic selection to render it visible. Mayer, in contrast, tests the long poem's capacity for radical inclusiveness and traces metonymic connections between daily routines and larger social issues. Ultimately, My Lifeand Midwinter Dayboth assert the co-existence and indeed the interconnectedness of intellectual inquiry and the domestic work of cooking, cleaning, and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Berrymans poetry volume 77 Dream Songs (1964) depicts its own composition as a vocational act of protest against the circumstances that force poets to teach in universities to earn a living. In Berrymans poems, this vocational crisis inspires a crisis of form; repetition, previously a central constituent of poetry, now evokes the specter of boring work-time. To realize ones creative potential, Berryman insists throughout his Songs that a poet needs "whole time,"free from the nine-to-five grind. In this era of expanding higher education, whole time comes in the form of fellowships, as private foundations offer the time and money to save poets from the classroom. Indeed, Berrymans second volume of Dream Songs regard their composition as a creative process enabled by a Guggenheim fellowship. However, this poetry also provides an ironic image of contemporary academic labor, where the dream of work as self-fulfillment parallels the nightmare of self-exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Anne Spencer has been regarded as one of the significant female poets of the Harlem Renaissance, less attention has been given to her role as an important innovator of American modernism. Spencers modernistformal experiments enabled her to express and enact herfeminist aspirations for modern -women. Her poems, including "Before the Feast at Shushan," "Letter to My Sister," and "The Lemming: O Sweden!," explore the psychodynamics of male dominance andfemale resistance, affirming literary modernism's liberatory potential for women in its ability to convey the affective experience of subordination and to disrupt older discursive structures rooted in masculinist ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Samuel Beckett pursues a practice of 'vaguening' his late work as a strategy that eschews an art of clarity in pursuit of vagueness as an aesthetic value in itself. Beckett's concern with the aesthetics of vagueness can be traced back to his earliest fiction and poetry, and his evolving ideas reflect and illuminate other theories of vagueness in art, from Keats's Negative Capability to postmodern theories of ' fuzzy fiction.' After an aesthetic turning point in 1962, when he advocated a 'new form' in art that will 'allow the mystery to invade us,' vagueness begins to dominate his late work, finding its fullest expression in Ill Seen Ill Said. Ultimately, Beckett aims not to thematize vagueness, but to reveal it - to embody the vague in art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than being his life's work, Larry Eigner's oeuvre is genuinely life-like - a zoetic formation. His poetry, experimental prose, and autobiographical writings expanded John Dewey's biological theory of art, bringing it into a post-World War II context in which machinic and artificial structures were increasingly understood to be capable of self-modulating, lively behavior. Eigner's provisional poetics - his refusal to give his texts a final, delineable format - offers an aesthetic counterpart to twentieth-century philosophical and scientific attempts to conceptualize (and construct) live bodies as openended, shifting organizations rather than organic wholes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Words nd Ends from Ez (1989), Jackson Mac Low systematically reads the letters of the name E-Z-R-A P-O-U-N-D through The Cantos, reducing Pound's source text to fragments in an attempt to generate a power-free poem. Using Heidegger's notion of power from his later writings, I argue that Mac Low's procedural method starts off as a reading process, and when operating as such, it actually succeeds in neutralizing textual power. However, when Mac Low publishes the work, textual power is reestablished, with Mac Low occupying the empowered authorial position. Rather than treating his work as an 'egoless' object of meditation, readers almost exclusively interpret Words nd Ends from Ez through Mac Low's biography, perceived intention, and/or procedural process. This importantly shows that authorial and textual power not only arise from the actual author and textual form, but also are a product of the reading process that ascribes ownership and control of the text to the author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theoretical understanding of the tradition and purposes of erasure poetry in the avant-garde tradition has been elucidated by such critics as Travis MacDonald and Brian McHale. These definitions, however, tend to homogenize all forms of erasure poetries into a single radical gesture. A closer examination of such texts beginning with their antecedents in the visual arts reveals a number of disparate techniques resulting in erasure and a wide variety of political and aesthetic results. Thus there are 'modernist,' conservative erasure works such as Ronald Johnson's Radi Os and 'postmodern,' destabilizing works such as Mary Ruefle's Little White Shadow. By my close reading of the category, Kenneth Goldsmith's book-length work Sports may be recognized as an erasure work, for his 'uncreative' transcripts, which, he claims, 'leave nothing out,' are actually radical erasures that fulfill a political purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review examines Sandeep Parmar's critical edition of the Collected Poems of British modernist writer Hope Mirrlees. Parmar's important archival work, discovering hitherto unpublished poems and much new biographical information about her subject, advances our knowledge of Mirrlees's complex location within and alongside British modernism. It also raises questions about the politics of canon revision and the present state of feminist recovery work. Responding to Jane Garrity's recent assertion that feminist recovery work is no longer 'hip,' the review wonders whether there might be other ways to engage the archive than to mine for texts that answer our present critical needs or that simply help us reconstruct the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been an increased amount of scholarly interest lately in T. S. Eliot's unfinished sequence, "Coriolan" (1932)—interest drawn from its Shakespearian allusiveness, and from analysis of this writings particularly rebarbative, jarring poetic. Although, however, the two parts of the sequence published by Eliot are acknowledged as being his nearest approach to poetic commentary upon contemporary political ideas, little criticism exists establishing the hinterland of the political thought, with which Eliot was most familiar, as editor of the Criterion. "Coriolan" emerges at a time when the lure of fascism pulled hardest at Eliot's sensibility. This article reviews the full political context provided by Eliot's journal, as well as considering the connections between that political engagement and the readings of Shakespeare he was also promulgating through this forum, in order to provide a more complex sense than hitherto of the diverse pressures underlying the unsettled nature of the existing "Coriolan" poems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes Amiri Baraka's Afro-Modernist epic, "Wise Why's Y's: The Griot's Song" ("Djeli Ya") throughout its composition process, within the contexts of Classical epic traditions, early twentieth-century American modernist long poems, and the griot traditions of West Africa. "Wise" is an Afro-Modernist epic that is unique in several respects: the epic shifts from the individual hero traditionally seen in the epic form to the collective, and displays a transnational, diasporic worldview opposed to a unitary national consciousness. Baraka uses the genre of the epic that at foundation coalesces national identity to question those very foundations. "Wise" does not follow the traditional narrative of the epic journey; the African American collective is unable to return to a physical location called ''home.'' Instead, "Wise" improvises a home for the African American collective through the act of performance, creating a jazz text combining poetry, music and visual art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marianne Moore treats humor as a means of both recognizing commonality and creating mutual understanding between individuals. In two comparatively minor poems, ''A Prize Bird'' (1915) and ''The Wood-Weasel'' (1942), Moore uses humor as a test of friendship, and suggests that sympathetic laughter constitutes a distinctively American approach to collaborative artistic creation. Humor in ''The Pangolin'' (1936), like the artists' tools Moore discusses in the poem, is both an end in itself and a means to ever-greater things: it becomes the marker of shared humanity and a medium for uniting the human with the divine. Throughout Moore's work, her humor can be read as a kind of ars poetica, modeling the synthesis of diverse components that she performs in her poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines modernist genealogy in Alice Notley's 1992 poem "The Descent of Alette." Notley's central speaker finds herself riding on a nightmarish subway ruled by a male tyrant who controls all artistic form. This article argues that the subway can be understood as an ongoing public to which poets since Pound have returned to experiment with impersonal poetic form. In Notley's poem, the subway signals vexed poetic lineage as well as the passageway to a new collective formal space. However, this article suggests, we must ask whether the poem's emphasis on private poetic speech qualifies the poem's feminist poetic imagination, or whether Notley's formal experimentation, particularly her use of citational quotation marks, leads to a workable notion of collective voice as the object of quest. Reading "Alette" against ''Doctor Williams' Heiresses,'' Notley's early experimental historiography, the article situates the question of private speech within the larger question of modernism's ''after-affects'' in postwar women's poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poet John Ashbery lived in Paris from roughly 1955 to 1965. It was during this period that Ashbery began writing art reviews, often examining the work of various Americans also living in Paris at this time. Among the many painters Ashbery was to review and publish about, one was the Chicago-born, Paris-based abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell and an exhibition of hers at a Paris gallery in 1964. In this essay I examine the early, more ''abstract'' poetry that Ashbery was developing during this period, thinking about it alongside the paintings of Mitchell (and, in particular, his writings about them). My contention is that Ashbery was in many ways emboldened by Mitchell's complex engagements with representation and abstraction, especially as they relate to the landscape. Ashbery was, through his close examination of such work, moved towards ever greater poetic and linguistic experimentations of his own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although James Schuyler's poems are often understood as celebrations of ordinary experience, this essay argues that some longer lyrics point to the uncanny and dangerous potential of ordinary language. By distinguishing between the use of literary and non-literary speech—the latter often signaled by quoted or spoken voices within the poems themselves—Schuyler's poems suggest how the ordinary can suppress urgent social and political dimensions of experience. For this reason, this essay also argues that Schuyler's work is significantly more politically engaged than it is sometimes given credit for being. Finally, the essay demonstrates that Schuyler's orientation toward the ordinary shares more with Continental, and less with Pragmatist, ideas of ordinariness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The critical reception of James Schuyler has emphasized his "descriptive exactness," "precision of detail" and embrace of what is everyday and ordinary: elements seen as elaborating a new relationship to "things as they are" and to objects generally. This essay shows how such aspects are complicated by important facets of Schuyler's work that have been insufficiently studied. Chief among them would be ekphrasis, which insists on the means of representation rather than the thing represented, and the trope of the letterpoem, which inscribes objects and words in intersubjective relationships of exchange and mediation of affect. Schuyler as poet of detailed observation can be understood only in the context of Schuyler as poet of address, interpellation and figural language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the longstanding critical assumption that the poems in W.B. Yeats's Responsibilities (1914) offer a categorical rejection of modern consumer society. Although Yeats is clearly disdainful of middle-class culture and nostalgic for a pre-modern community unified by the arts, the poems, I argue, strategically exploit the logic of the modern marketplace. By looking at the poems in rhetorical terms, as cultural productions designed to convince people in the present to spend money on the proposed Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art, I suggest that Yeats exploits commercial logic in three specific ways: by associating mundane consumer exchange with hoarding, as if the true capitalist is a miser; by tapping into the modern advertising strategy of equating choice of purchases with self-worth; and by rendering the object for purchase in abstract terms, such that the "product," again in good advertising fashion, always promises something more than it can deliver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ezra Pound and Nazim Hikmet, quintessential modernist poets, share similarities as striking as their differences. Both poets were charged with treason and incarcerated for long periods because of their radical ideologies—fascism and communism, respectively. This essay focuses on modernist poetry at the intersections of formal revolutions in poetic techniques, radical politics, and state curtailment of the rights of free speech. I trace the complicated relationship between poetry and the state, and the effect of incarceration on the formal redirection of the two poets' work while they were in prison, where they produced what is generally considered to be their best work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the formal role played by satire in the early drafts of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." I argue that the precise character of this role comes into relief only when satire is located among the strategies Eliot marshals to reconcile the conflictual poles of his poetics: the critical-historical and the creative, tradition and innovation. Satire appears in the drafts of "The Waste Land" as an immanent means of managing the excesses of literary history, as a way for the "mature poet" to recollect the past while distinguishing himself from it. Accordingly, I suggest, satire's disappearance from the final version of the poem, and its replacement by the so-called "mythical method," signals satire's failure to accomplish the specific tasks that Eliot sets for it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that Charles Reznikoff's "Holocaust" is a response to the controversy that broke out among Jewish intellectuals in the wake of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. I demonstrate that Reznikoff 's documentary poems, drawn from transcripts of the Eichmann and Nuremberg trials, work to undercut the politicization of survivor testimony in the Israeli prosecution's case against Eichmann. Reznikoff implicitly sides with Hannah Arendt against the sentimental Zionist cause for which his wife Marie Syrkin and Attorney General Gideon Hausner fought. My central claim is that "Holocaust" appropriates survivors' language in order to demonstrate the limits and political dangers of appropriating emotion. As such, Reznikoff 's objectivist approach offers an alternative to recent work on historical trauma, models that often call on us to identify with survivors in order to understand the Holocaust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that Robert Frost's poems enact a poetic and psychic process of displacing and managing generalized anxiety through converting it into object-specific fear. Drawing upon the psychoanalytical work of Sigmund Freud, Dominick LaCapra and Eric Santner, this essay analyzes how and why Robert Frost's poems display a "defensive eye": a self-protective relationship to the world dependent upon a continual switching of visual and linguistic perspectives that diffuses the pressures interior to the poem and creates a "momentary stay against confusion." Through close readings of "The Vantage Point," "The Mending Wall," "The Wood-Pile," "The Fear," "An Old Man's Winter Night" and "A Considerable Speck," the essay traces Frost's visual preoccupation with boundaries, walls, doors, and frames that demarcate spatial limits, and describes how the poem negotiates the psychological and linguistic tension between containment and catharsis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given that Marianne Moore never married and apparently never fell in love, readers have long puzzled over the inspiration for "Marriage." Why would the least autobiographical member of her famously impersonal generation devote her longest poem to such a subject? By tracing the friendship between Moore and Scofield Thayer through archival sources, this essay reveals for the first time that Thayer proposed to Moore in 1921 and that she wrote "Marriage" as an angry rebuke to him. Reading the poem in this context shows it to be not simply "a little anthology of statements that took my fancy," as Moore later described it, but rather an instance of "by-play" being "more terrible in its effectiveness than the fiercest frontal attack." The poem presents an impassioned indictment of all loveless marriages but allows for those rare marriages that exemplify the paradox of "Liberty and union, now and forever." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the contexts of an "anthropological imaginary" that inform a close reading of William Carlos Williams's "Spring and All" (1923). It seeks to expand the associations of modernism and anthropology from the typical conflation of these terms with the poetry of T. S. Eliot and anthropologist James Frazer by linking Williams's interests with Franz Boas, the most established anthropologist in the United States at the time. Williams's focus on the local is similar to Boas's stress on site-specific observation. But Williams's local is the result of a pattern of dislocation in modernity, which Williams incorporates in his poems and turns back against the disembodied scientific language of anthropology that cannot record the participant-observer's disruption and desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1909, Forster delivered a scathing lecture about Rudyard Kipling, which outlines the political dangers implicit in Kipling's aesthetic. This introduction to the lecture briefly examines Forster's critique of Kipling's politics and aesthetic found in both the lecture and subsequent reviews of Kipling's work. Central to Forster's critique is his conviction that contemporary culture is and should be moving from authoritarian to democratic political systems. While Forster acknowledges Kipling's power and skill as a writer, he suggests that Kipling's aesthetic genius belongs to an earlier stage in the world's development, when authoritarian political models dominated. Within Forster's aristocratic democracy, Kipling's poetry is not only found wanting; it is politically debilitating and dangerous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reads Kenneth Fearing's Depression-era poetry as an innovative body of Marxist verse, one that attempts to craft an aesthetic reaction of shock and disorientation in the reader. In order to explicate the use-value of aesthetic shock to a Marxist politics concerned with anti-capitalist praxis, it draws on Susan Buck-Morss's interpretation of Walter Benjamin, an interpretation that focuses on the latter's theorization of aesthetic sensation in the modern period. Because the modern condition is one of anaesthetized sensory existence (an existence managed by and conducive to hegemonic capitalism), the use of poetry to spark sensation in the reader can be a revolutionary project. Fearing accomplishes this project by confronting the primary agent of shock in the modern period, electricity, and exploring it in its full dialectical complexity. Fearing is a Marxist poet, but of a different sort than most Depression-era proletarian poets. His poems do not provide ideological guidance in the manner of propaganda, nor do they stop at ideology critique. Instead, they act upon the senses of the reader in order to awaken him or her from the dreamworld of modern capitalism to the real need for transformative struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses in the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. It emphasizes that during the period when Millay's poetry was at its peak, her poetry was delivered in appreciable composition. Literary critic John Stuart Mill has described Millay's soft verse as a lyrical act. Some critics describe Millay's works that focused on topics of enchantment.

Investigates the poetry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Influence on each other's poetic approach; Analysis of the ways in which Plath looted Hughes' poetic corpus; Interpretation of Hughes' poem entitled "Phaetons."

The article discusses on the impersonal theory of poetry and its relationship with Anne Sexton. The American poet Sexton although routinely categorized as a confessional poet indeed as the mother or "High-Priestess" of the mode infrequently used the epithet, preferring the term personal. Sexton's appropriation of the adjective personal in preference to the more usual confessional sends a number of important messages. It signals her unease with the confessional mode as then defined, and her sense that the label is an inadequate descriptor of her own complex and sophisticated poetics.