Poetry In America Research Articles

Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America.

Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America.

Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America

Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America

Who Would Not Sing for Humboldt?

Emily Dickinson begins one of her poems by complaining that some unspecified They have shut her up in Prose. Of course, as she says in another poem, it really isn't that much of a problem because she dwells most of the time in Possibility.' By Possibility,, Dickinson meant Poetry: that special exuberance of spirit which accompanied the self-creating, sometimes self-obliterating activity of the poet. By poet I mean lyric poet: the writer who in the production of art deals primarily in his or her own consciousness, a consciousness which both creates and is in turn created by the world with which it is joined in unending intercourse. Quintessentially romantic in their provenance, these definitions aptly describe Emily Dickinson and her work, just as they describe the persons and creative efforts of Dickinson's two great nineteenth-century contemporaries Whitman and Emerson and those of a great many other practitioners of poetry in America and England during the last two hundred years. For the most vital and persistent paradigms of both the poet and poetry that we of this century have seen fit to sustain are the ones, if not established by, at least most often associated with, those writers at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries in Europe, and especially in England. To exaggerate only slightly,

Poetry in America: Expression and Its Values in the Times of Bryant, Whitman, and Pound

Poetry in America: Expression and Its Values in the Times of Bryant, Whitman, and Pound

Poetry in America: Expression and its Values in the Times of Bryant, Whitman, and Pound.

Poetry in America: Expression and its Values in the Times of Bryant, Whitman, and Pound.

Poetry in America: Expression and Its Values in the Times of Bryant, Whitman, and Pound

Poetry in America: Expression and Its Values in the Times of Bryant, Whitman, and Pound

Women as Poets

Less pliant, safer as a biological organism, she remains fixed in her famous attitudes, and indifferent to intellectuality ; thus John Crowe Ransom on The Poet as Woman. x Indifferent to intellectuality: Laura Riding, one-time winner of The Fugitive prize? Fixed in her attitudes: Marianne Moore, whose writing W. C. Williams characterized as swiftness impaling beauty? 2 Fixity is the last attribute Gertrude Stein assigns to Americans, men or women : it is some thing strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving, a space of time that is filled always filled with moving ... an American thing. 3 To what extent is Stein's infamous iteration a female, let alone an American mode? This is the kind of question that tends to be begged by Emily Stipes Watts in her well-documented survey of The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945.* She admits that her main preoccupation is thematic, and this correlates with her belief that most women's poetry in America has been com municative (p. 166). On the other hand, she claims as significantly female triumphs the formal experimentation of an H. D. or a Marianne Moore. For this last claim, she has T. S. Eliot's qualified sanction : Miss Moore's poetry is as ' feminine ' as Christina Rossetti's, one never forgets that it is written by a woman; but with both one never thinks of this particularly as anything but a positive virtue. 5 Yet, as Ms. Watts remarks, not one of the essays on Marianne Moore collected by Charles Tomlinson for the Twentieth Century Views series was written by a woman.6 It remains for the generation of women that has dis covered itself in the decade since that collection appeared to explore, with an open-mindedness previously impossible, the precise nature of such qualifications, and to establish not only an adequate feminist critique, but also a critique of simple-minded feminism.

Bernard Duffey, Poetry in America: Expression and its Values in the Times of Bryant, Whitman, and Pound (Durham, North Carolina: Duke Univ. Press, 1978, $14.75). Pp xiv, 358.

Bernard Duffey, Poetry in America: Expression and its Values in the Times of Bryant, Whitman, and Pound (Durham, North Carolina: Duke Univ. Press, 1978, $14.75). Pp xiv, 358.

Inside Narratives

George Bornstein. The Postromantic Consciousness of Ezra Pound, English Literary Studies Monograph Series, No. 8. Victoria, B.C.: The University of Victoria, 1977. 84 pp. Ellen Williams. Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance: The First Ten Years of "Poetry," 1912-22. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. 312 pp. Bernard Duffey. Poetry in America: Expression and Its Values in the Times of Bryant. Whitman, and Pound. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1978. 358 pp. In A Short Sad Book, George Bowering quips that "Canada is the country in which writing about history is history." It might be said with equal truth that the United States is the country in which writing about literature is literature. Without books like R.W. B. Lewis's The American Adam or Roy Harvey Pearce's The Continuity of American Poetry, there would be no American literature. Instead we would have American writers existing precariously and provincially on the edges of English literature. The first task of the American literary historian, then, has been to create American Literature out of the apparently uncoordinated efforts of numbers of his countrymen writing in the language of a foreign country.

Poetry in America: Expression and Its Values in the Times of Bryant, Whitman, and Pound

Poetry in America: Expression and Its Values in the Times of Bryant, Whitman, and Pound

Contemporary Poetry in America

Contemporary Poetry in America

Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in Historical Interpretation.

Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in Historical Interpretation.

Blyden Jackson and Louis Rubin. BLACK POETRY IN AMERICA. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1974.

Journal Article Blyden Jackson and Louis Rubin. BLACK POETRY IN AMERICA. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1974. Get access Blyden Jackson and Louis Rubin. Black Poetry in America. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1974. MELUS, Volume 2, Issue 2, June 1975, Page 8, https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/2.2.8 Published: 01 June 1975

Black Poetry in America

Black Poetry in America

Black Poetry in America

Black Poetry in America

Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in Historical Interpretation

Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in Historical Interpretation

A Survey of Poetry in the Periodicals

THE RESULTS of the following survey are intended to be of use to the poet, teacher, or librarian who is interested in the complex and shifting world of poetry published in various types of periodicals, including literary journals, little magazines, and trade magazines. The respondents were asked simply to list the four or five periodicals which, in their estimations, presently publish the highest quality poetry in America. The respondents listed from as few as three to as many as ten titles. The composition of the group surveyed was kept as heterogeneous as possible with respect to age, sex, racial or ethnic background, and geographical range. Sixty-five poets and teachers of contemporary poetry at the college level responded to the survey. They represented thirty-five states and every geographical region of the continental United States. Every major urban area of the country was represented, usually by two or more respondents, and towns and cities of intermediate size and rural areas were also represented. The findings of the survey will be listed in four groups according to the number of votes received. The intent of the survey was to identify some twenty to thirty titles about which there appeared to be considerable agreement. The first three groups constitute the realization of that intent; the fourth group includes most of the other titles mentioned by the respondents. Understandably, the survey includes biases and prejudices along with serious value judgments, and as a result the earlier groups (A, B, and C) are more reliable as an index of quality than Group D. The survey, however, is of what one justifiably call informed opinion, and most of the titles in Group D print outstanding poems. Several respondents did observe that a major problem with the periodical publication of poetry is uneven quality; therefore, it may be assumed that the first groups of titles indicate those periodicals felt to publish consistently the best poetry. No attempt has been made to provide titles which the respondents might have mentioned, but did not; as a result, some readers may not find in the lists below what they consider to be an obvious choice. Other sources of information concerning the maze of periodicals which publish poetry vary widely in eclecticism and amount of information provided. The most informative eclectic listing is Bill Katz's Magazines for Libraries (New York: R. R. Bowker Co., 1972), now in an expanded second edition with a sup-

History as Animated Metaphor in the Maximus Poems

C HARLES OLSON has been shoved aside in the recent critical rush to Lowell and Ginsberg. Yet, George Garrett, discussing contemporary radical poets, calls grand pooh-bah of the lodge, the big daddy,' and Hayden Carruth in his anthology of twentieth-century American verse says: Olson exerted, through his poems, criticism, and personal connections with younger poets, a more profound influence than anyone else on the course of poetry in America during the fifteen years past.2 Olson's reputation as a poet depends upon critical attitudes toward his major work, the Maximus Poems, a long open sequence left unfinished at his death in 197o. It works by cumulative effect, moving like Song of Myself, either backing up or going forward, but always and insistently in motion. Like the Cantos, Maximus attempts to destroy historical time.3 And like Paterson, Maximus grounds itself firmly in a place, Gloucester, Massachusetts, where spent most of his life. explores this town and its history, not for nostalgia, but for metaphor. The historical people, places, and events become ideas-in-motion, animated metaphors, or in Robert Creeley's words, tokens for a particular kind of activity and its apparent value.4 This historical material, usually connected with Gloucester's settlement and growth, is the chief figurative language of Maximus, individually and cumulatively adding depth and scope to the poem as each character, place, and incident suggests some aspect of the Maximus life or mu-sick society's opposition to it.

Recent French Poetics and the Spirit of Mallarme

The single most telling metaphor which French poetics has created in the last ten years seems to me the word ecriture. This concern among the French is all the more interesting at a time when the nature of poetry in America has been redefined by poets touring the continent and reciting their lines for enormous fees while their books do not sell. Examined in the light of the poetics of l'ecriture, poetry readings cause a problem. They afford pleasure because they are sonorous performances of an otherwise silent score. But it is a perverse pleasure, since it dramatizes everything about poems that is unliterary: the poet's looks, voice, accent, social class, and declared meaning. Reading aloud even robs the poem of some of its specific qualia: the aspects of words on the page, the etymologies which sounds dissolve but letters conserve, the spacing which silent reading alone permits, and finally, most precious of all, the printed guarantee of permanence. Literature is a record of letters, literally, which is again to say, by means of letters. A return to these truisms about the literacy of literature seems to attract some French theorists today, whether their names sound familiar to us, like Sartre and Barthes, or new like Derrida, Sollers, Pleynet, and the other structuralists who write in Tel Quel. The common presence behind them all is the ghost of Stephane Mallarme. The distinction between prose and poetry which Sartre made in the first chapter of What is Literature? over twenty years ago is too well known to need rehearsing here. However, I still find it new

Richard Lewis and Augustan American Poetry

Most Augustan poetry in America remains unattributed and unstudied. However, a critical study of the poems by Richard Lewis (1700?-34) reveals that he was not only the best Augustan American poet but also the first and most successful American nature poet before Bryant. His “To Mr. Samuel Hastings,” a progress piece on shipbuilding, is the earliest poem on an American industry. “A Journey from Patapsco to Annapolis,” a Thomsonian nature poem, and “Food for Clitics,” which anticipates Freneau, both contain the best elements of Lewis' poetry: a philosophy of scientific deism, praise of nature and the Creator, extended descriptions and catalogues of flowers, wildlife, and rivers presented in fine images which show his exact powers of observation, and the themes of the superiority of American nature, the wilderness as Eden, and the lost innocence of America. Pope refers to Lewis' “A Journey” in the Dunciad. His occasional verses, such as the one in honor of Lord Baltimore which shows Lewis' sense of history and patriotism, and his poems on Governor B. L. Calvert also reveal his merit. His reflection of contemporary poets and philosophers, his anticipation of significant American themes, and the excellence of his poetry all suggest that Lewis was an important poet.