Robert Lowell and the Sublime

Robert Lowell and the Sublime PDF Author: Henry Hart
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Henry Hart establishes the connection between Robert Lowell - one of the most important American poets of the last fifty years - and one of the principal sites of current aesthetic theory, the sublime, a prominent tradition in literature, which traces journeys beyond ordinary language and behavior into exalted states. Lowell's casual interest in the sublime, which eventually became an obsession, dominated his poetry. By searching archives and manuscript collections that take us back to Lowell's beginnings at St. Mark's, Harvard, and Kenyon, the author uncovers early and telling instances of the poet's interest in the poetics of sublimity. Hart illuminates the complexities of this poet's imagination in original ways, connecting Lowell firmly to the tradition of American Romanticism. He provides insights into Lowell's poems, especially the lesser-known works and discerns an allegorical pattern throughout the poetry that involves two interrelated elements: battles against patriarchal gods and failed, often demonic quests for transcendent ideals. He maintains that this pattern of battle and quest has its roots in Lowell's Oedipal struggle against his father, and that quest is essential to attaining an experience of the sublime. Linking these two concepts - the Oedipal struggle and the sublime - is entirely new in Lowell studies.

Robert Lowell and the Sublime

Robert Lowell and the Sublime PDF Author: Henry Hart
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
Henry Hart establishes the connection between Robert Lowell - one of the most important American poets of the last fifty years - and one of the principal sites of current aesthetic theory, the sublime, a prominent tradition in literature, which traces journeys beyond ordinary language and behavior into exalted states. Lowell's casual interest in the sublime, which eventually became an obsession, dominated his poetry. By searching archives and manuscript collections that take us back to Lowell's beginnings at St. Mark's, Harvard, and Kenyon, the author uncovers early and telling instances of the poet's interest in the poetics of sublimity. Hart illuminates the complexities of this poet's imagination in original ways, connecting Lowell firmly to the tradition of American Romanticism. He provides insights into Lowell's poems, especially the lesser-known works and discerns an allegorical pattern throughout the poetry that involves two interrelated elements: battles against patriarchal gods and failed, often demonic quests for transcendent ideals. He maintains that this pattern of battle and quest has its roots in Lowell's Oedipal struggle against his father, and that quest is essential to attaining an experience of the sublime. Linking these two concepts - the Oedipal struggle and the sublime - is entirely new in Lowell studies.

Words in Air

Words in Air PDF Author: Elizabeth Bishop
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374531898
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 930

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Book Description
Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop that "you ha[ve] always been my favorite poet and favorite friend." The feeling was mutual. Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling "picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry," and she once begged him, "Please never stop writing me letters—they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I've been re-reading Emerson) for several days." Neither ever stopped writing letters, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell's death in 1977. Presented in Words in Air is the complete correspondence between Bishop and Lowell. The substantial, revealing—and often very funny—interchange that they produced stands as a remarkable collective achievement, notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, its wealth of literary history, its incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and its delicious literary gossip, as well as for the window it opens into the unfolding human and artistic drama of two of America's most beloved and influential poets.

The American Sublime

The American Sublime PDF Author: Mary Arensberg
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780887061899
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
American poetics has been radicalized in recent years by revisionist theories which replay and ground poets against their Romantic precursors. Beginning with the sublime politics of Emerson and ending with women poets who renounce the authority of gender, The American Sublime represents the various modes of recent critical thinking. This collection of essays takes up the mapping of the American sublime begun by Harold Bloo. Prefaced by an introduction that traces the sublime from its origins in Longinus through Kant, Freud and Bloom, the essays focus on central American poetic scenes. These include the transparency of Emerson's vision of the sublime, Whitman's passage to India, Dickinson's corridors of the soul, and Stevens' contemplation of death in the auroras.

Robert Lowell In Context

Robert Lowell In Context PDF Author: Thomas Austenfeld
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009465708
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description


Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire

Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire PDF Author: Kay R. Jamison
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307700275
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
"In his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry, Robert Lowell (1917-1977) put his manic-depressive illness into the public domain. Now Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison brings her expertise to bear on his story, illuminating the relationship between bipolar illness and creativity, and examining how Lowell's illness and the treatment he received came to bear on his work"--

The Sublime

The Sublime PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1604134437
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
The sublime in literature is described as the sense of awe that is evoked in the presence of great power and grandeur in nature or in art. In this engaging new volume, the role of the sublime is discussed in ""Emma"", ""Ode to the West Wind"", ""Song of Myself"", and many other works. Featuring original essays and excerpts from previously published critical analyses, each book in the new Bloom's ""Literary Themes"" series gives students valuable insight into the title's subject theme.

Robert Lowell, Nihilist as Hero

Robert Lowell, Nihilist as Hero PDF Author: Vereen M. Bell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674775855
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Vereen Bell gives us a subtly reasoned account of the pattern of Lowell's poetry is characterized above all by its chronic and systematic pessimism, but that, paradoxically, Lowell's reluctance to accept the consequences of his own unsparing vision is what gives his poetry its vigor, richness, and tonal complexity.

Life Studies and For the Union Dead

Life Studies and For the Union Dead PDF Author: Robert Lowell
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374530963
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Robert Lowell, with Elizabeth Bishop, stands apart as the greatest American poet of the latter half of the twentieth century—and Life Studies and For the Union Dead stand as among his most important volumes. In Life Studies, which was first published in 1959, Lowell moved away from the formality of his earlier poems and started writing in a more confessional vein. The title poem of For the Union Dead concerns the death of the Civil War hero (and Lowell ancestor) Robert Gould Shaw, but it also largely centers on the contrast between Boston's idealistic past and its debased present at the time of its writing, in the early 1960's. Throughout, Lowell addresses contemporaneous subjects in a voice and style that themselves push beyond the accepted forms and constraints of the time.

Inferno

Inferno PDF Author: Eileen Myles
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
ISBN: 9781593762117
Category : Experimental fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Loosely following Dante's epic by fashioning her own riveting account into three distinct parts, Eileen Myles brings her unparalleled brand of raw intellect and insight to her latest novel, The Inferno. The first part of the story, mesmerizing readers with its ripple of memoir, tells the saga (or hell) of a poet girl. The second, on the surface, provides instruction on how to write a poem--but it also pulls a clever bait-and-switch by informing readers how to become a lesbian as well. Myles's exposition of lesbianity, in fact, includes six pages of female genitalia that rival anything Henry Miller ever produced. The third and final part of the book is a fictional proposal to a funding organization in which the author obliges the foundation's request to supply them with her career narrative, but instead of the tedious sanitized version, she offers a bluntly truthful one. Full of travel disasters, bad readings of wonderful poems, and death, this last section is Myles's Purgatorio--a litany chronicling the career of a poet and her writing life. Myles's rebellious spirit is fully present here as she injects her signature blurring of memoir and fiction, poem and essay, to reinforce her status as one of America's most groundbreaking writers. This eagerly anticipated follow-up to her landmark Cool for You will not disappoint fans of Myles or of modern literature itself.

Lost Puritan

Lost Puritan PDF Author: Paul L. Mariani
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393313741
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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Book Description
National Book Award nominee Paul Mariani offers a passionate, highly readable biography of one of America's great poets. Using many of Robert Lowell's unpublished letters as well as interviews with his friends and relatives, Mariani captures the greatness, humor, and heartbreak of this literary giant.