Fictions of Form in American Poetry

Fictions of Form in American Poetry PDF Author: Stephen Cushman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140086352X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville prophesied that American writers would slight, even despise, form--that they would favor the sensational over rational order. He suggested that this attitude was linked to a distinct concept of democracy in America. Exposing the inaccuracies of such claims when applied to poetry, Stephen Cushman maintains that American poets tend to overvalue the formal aspects of their art and in turn overestimate the relationship between those formal aspects and various ideas of America. In this book Cushman examines poems and prose statements in which poets as diverse as Emily Dickinson and Ezra Pound describe their own poetic forms, and he investigates links and analogies between poets' notions of form and their notions of "Americanness.". The book begins with a brief discussion of Whitman, who said, "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." Cushman takes this to mean that American poetry has succeeded in making fictions about itself which persuade its readers that its uniqueness transcends merely geographical boundaries. He explores the truth of this statement by considering the Americanness of Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, and A. R. Ammons. He concludes that the uniqueness of American poetry lies not so much in its forms as in its formalism and in the various attitudes that formalism reveals. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Fictions of Form in American Poetry

Fictions of Form in American Poetry PDF Author: Stephen Cushman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140086352X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville prophesied that American writers would slight, even despise, form--that they would favor the sensational over rational order. He suggested that this attitude was linked to a distinct concept of democracy in America. Exposing the inaccuracies of such claims when applied to poetry, Stephen Cushman maintains that American poets tend to overvalue the formal aspects of their art and in turn overestimate the relationship between those formal aspects and various ideas of America. In this book Cushman examines poems and prose statements in which poets as diverse as Emily Dickinson and Ezra Pound describe their own poetic forms, and he investigates links and analogies between poets' notions of form and their notions of "Americanness.". The book begins with a brief discussion of Whitman, who said, "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." Cushman takes this to mean that American poetry has succeeded in making fictions about itself which persuade its readers that its uniqueness transcends merely geographical boundaries. He explores the truth of this statement by considering the Americanness of Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, and A. R. Ammons. He concludes that the uniqueness of American poetry lies not so much in its forms as in its formalism and in the various attitudes that formalism reveals. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Best American Poetry, 1990

The Best American Poetry, 1990 PDF Author: Jorie Graham
Publisher: Scribner Paper Fiction
ISBN: 9780020327851
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
An anthology of contemporary poets presents works that reflect the diversity in American poetry.

Strong Measures

Strong Measures PDF Author: Philip Dacey
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description


The Vintage Book of African American Poetry

The Vintage Book of African American Poetry PDF Author: Michael S. Harper
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030776513X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
In The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, editors Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton present the definitive collection of black verse in the United States--200 years of vision, struggle, power, beauty, and triumph from 52 outstanding poets. From the neoclassical stylings of slave-born Phillis Wheatley to the wistful lyricism of Paul Lawrence Dunbar . . . the rigorous wisdom of Gwendolyn Brooks...the chiseled modernism of Robert Hayden...the extraordinary prosody of Sterling A. Brown...the breathtaking, expansive narratives of Rita Dove...the plaintive rhapsodies of an imprisoned Elderidge Knight . . . The postmodern artistry of Yusef Komunyaka. Here, too, is a landmark exploration of lesser-known artists whose efforts birthed the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movements--and changed forever our national literature and the course of America itself. Meticulously researched, thoughtfully structured, The Vintage Book of African-American Poetry is a collection of inestimable value to students, educators, and all those interested in the ever-evolving tradition that is American poetry.

101 Great American Poems

101 Great American Poems PDF Author: The American Poetry & Literacy Project
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486110265
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
Rich treasury of verse from the 19th and 20th centuries includes works by Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, other notables.

Form and Fable in American Fiction

Form and Fable in American Fiction PDF Author: Daniel Hoffman
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813915258
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Combining the disciplines of folklore and literary criticism in his perceptive readings of works by Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain, Daniel Hoffman demonstrates how these authors transformed materials from both high and popular culture, from their European past and their American present, in works that helped to form our national consciousness. In his new preface, Hoffman describes the evolution of his critical method and suggests the book's value for contemporary readers.

Great American Prose Poems

Great American Prose Poems PDF Author: David Lehman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439105111
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
A prose poem is a poem written in prose rather than verse. But what does that really mean? Is it an indefinable hybrid? An anomaly in the history of poetry? Are the very words "prose poem" an oxymoron? This groundbreaking anthology edited by celebrated poet David Lehman, editor of The Best American Poetry series, traces the form in all its dazzling variety from Poe and Emerson to Auden and Ashbery and on, right up to the present. In his brilliant and lucid introduction, Lehman explains that a prose poem can make use of all the strategies and tactics of poetry, but works in sentences rather than lines. He also summarizes the prose poem's French heritage, its history in the United States, and the salient differences between verse and prose. Arranged chronologically to allow readers to trace the gradual development of this hybrid genre, the poems anthologized here include important works from such masters of American literature as Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, James Schuyler, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, and Elizabeth Bishop. Contemporary mainstays and emerging poets -- Robert Bly, John Ashbery, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Russell Edson, James Tate, Anne Carson, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Lydia Davis, among them -- are represented with their best work in the field. The prose poem is beginning to enjoy a tremendous upswing in popularity. Readers of this marvelous collection, a must-have for anyone interested in the current state of the art, will learn why.

Poems of the American Empire

Poems of the American Empire PDF Author: Jen Hedler Phillis
Publisher: New American Canon
ISBN: 1609386612
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Poems of the American Empire argues that careful attention to a particular strain of twentieth-century lyric poetry yields a counter-history of American global power. The period that Phillis covers--from Ezra Pound's A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1930 to Cathy Park Hong's Engine Empire in 2012--roughly matches what some consider the ascent and decline of the American empire. The diverse poems that appear in this book are united by their use of epic forms in the lyric poem, a combination that violates a fundamental framework of both genres' relationship to time. This book makes a groundbreaking intervention by insisting that lyric time is key to understanding the genre. These poems demonstrate the lyric form's ability to represent the totality of history, making American imperial power visible in its fullness. Neither strictly an empty celebration of American exceptionalism nor a catalog of atrocities, Poems of the American Empire allows us to see both.

Short Form American Poetry

Short Form American Poetry PDF Author: Will Montgomery
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 9781399500548
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Reading a century of American poetry through the prism of short form, this book analyses the centrality of an aesthetic of brevity to American modernist verse.

The Poetry of the Americas

The Poetry of the Americas PDF Author: Harris Feinsod
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190682000
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
"This book narrates exchanges between English- and Spanish-language poets in the American hemisphere from the late 1930s through the rise of the 1960s. It doing so, it contributes to a crucial current of humanistic inquiry: the effort to write a cosmopolitan literary history adequate to the age of globalization. Building on correspondence and manuscripts from collections in Europe and the Americas, the book first traces the material contours of an evolving literary network that exceeds the conventional model of "the two Americas." These relations depend on changing contexts: an era of state-sponsored transnationalism, from the wartime intensification of Good Neighbor diplomacy, to the Cold War cultural policy programs of the Alliance for Progress in the 1960s; a prosperous market for translations of Latin American poetry in the US; and a growing alternative print sphere of bilingual vanguard journals such as El Corno Emplumado (Mexico City, 1962-1969). As the book articulates these histories of exchange, it also theorizes how poets employ the resources of language to transform popular images of the hemisphere from a locus of political conflict into a venue of supranational cultural citizenship. Feinsod describes how inter-Americanism was enacted through diplomatic structures of literary address, multilingual writing, and appeals to a shared indigenous heritage through the genre of the meditation on ruins. By tracing the coevolution of midcentury poetry with the geopolitics of the hemisphere, the book expands existing literary histories of the period through revelatory comparative readings supported by archival findings"--