DOCSLIB.ORG

65-71. Multiculturalism in Contemporary American Poetry Robert J. Bertholf Berth

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
65-71. Multiculturalism in Contemporary American Poetry Robert J. Bertholf Berth Journal of American Studies of Turkey 1 (1995): 65-71. Multiculturalism in Contemporary American Poetry Robert J. Bertholf [email protected] The period 1968-1972 formed a pivot for American poetry, especially for the avant-garde. The turmoil in the society caused by the Vietnam War came to a climax. President Johnson declined to run for office for a second term, and in the aftermath of the war and more betrayals of the public trust, President Nixon was forced to leave the Presidency in 1974. The 1960s ended and the 1970s began with deep divisions in the society, the economy as well as in the province of poetry. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson engineered the passage of the Civil Rights Bill through Congress. This was the culmination of years of social protest and civil right marches. But there would be no going back to a separated society of isolated minorities. It produced the beginning of a cultural openness in American society; it allowed the voices of minorities to be heard, to have political as well as artistic and poetic authority. It must be borne in mind that forming a multicultural society has always been the promise of America as a nation. America is an immigrant society which imposed itself on Native American society and then imported Africans as an economic factor. That is not an apology. It has always been a sour irony of American history that the equality embedded in our nation's Constitution and Bill of Rights by men of great vision has struggled to emerge as actual social, political, and artistic equality. Each generation, for centuries, erected barriers to the forthright exhibition of the promised equality. Politics does press. The present discussion is still another round of growing: as Wallace Stevens said with great hope, "the real will from its crude compoundings come." American poetry was also in turmoil. Theodore Roethke and John Berryman died, and Robert Lowell had stopped publishing. The major poets of the avant-garde had been involved in the antiwar movements and that effort had exacted an emotional and intellectual penalty. Denise Levertov was bruised by the conflict. Robert Duncan published his volume, Roots and Branches, in 1968, and announced privately that he would not publish another book for fifteen years. He announced that publicly in 1972 when he published a reissued edition of Caesar's Gate. He removed himself from the world of publishing, a victim, he said, of the cultural times. In 1970 Charles Olson died. Olson instituted a massive redirection in American poetry away from closed forms with prescribed definitions, an allegiance back to Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren's Understanding Poetry and to John Crowe Ransom's The New Criticism. With his essay "Projective Verse" (1950), and the subsequent volumes of The Maximus Poems (1951, 1953, 1960), American poetry re-engaged itself in the action of the imagination that generated forms that were not predetermined, but were projections of the energy of content of expression. This new kind of poetry had its roots in the field composition of Miro's paintings of the mid 1920s, in such canvasses as "The Farmer," "The Tilled Field," and "Banquet of the Harlequin," all from 1923-1925. It also held allegiances to Pound's The Cantos, Louis Zukofsky's A and All, and William Carlos Williams's Spring and All (1923) and Paterson. Allen Ginsberg had attracted attention to "the Beat Movement" with the reading and then publication of his poems Howl (1956), but by 1969 both Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidey were dead. Ginsberg's book of poems about the 1960s came out in 1972 as The Fall of America. The Beat Movement changed into the `hippy' movement; and then the whole underground system in America emerged with the splash of Woodstock in 1969. In American painting, the high accomplishments of the Abstract Expressionists were over: Jackson Pollock was dead, Arshley Gorky was dead, as was Barnett Newman. William de Kooning was painting major paintings, but a second generation of painters had arrived, which included Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaller, Michael Goldberg, and Al Held. Robert Roschenberg and Jasper Johns had also arrived on the scene, and immediately gave up the painterly image in favor of collage, the use of junk and trash attached to the paintings. Johns's use of numbers, flags, and maps matched Robert Indiana's use of soup cans as subjects for painting. Soon, Larry Goons, Elsworth Kelly, Brice Marden and others would enter the scene with a minimalist approach to objects of art. Like the avant-garde in painting, the avant garde in poetry turned away from the high traditions of the past and opened up their work to include subjects and sources from a variety of backgrounds that had not been considered subjects for art and poetry before. American literature in the nineteenth-century was based on the heroic action of individual struggles against European traditions, against the huge geography of the North American continent. Hawthorne, Melville, and Cooper, as well as Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman are major figures in this literature. As late as the 1930s, oddly enough, these writers were neglected by the reading public. The rediscovery of Melville and especially of Whitman as directive forces of a new literary history influenced the avant-garde in America. Emerson and Thoreau, the main prophets of the transcendentalist vision, suffered from the general condemnation of the "romantic" in all the arts. Ironically, at the end of the twentieth-century, Whitman is the central poet, the foundation point for moving past the heroic principles and the conservative poetic line based on the immense domination of the criticism of T.S. Eliot. Moby-Dick probes deep into the transcendental values of the New England mind, even as it takes the Pacific Ocean as a metaphor for the great plains of America. Charles Olson carried on this heroic action in his book on Melville, Call Me Ishmael (1947), in which he declared SPACE to be the most important theme of the book and of American culture. The figure of Maximus in Olson's poems was the avatar of the colonial experience, the voice of the town and history of Gloucester, MA, the heroic builder of cities and societies. In 1968, heroic principles were turned upside-down in a mock-heroic poem by Edward Dorn in the first book of Gunslinger (1968), and then in the second book (1969). This long poem, which was collected in 1975, created a parable of a journey from Boston to Las Vegas, and then to Four Corners, in search of Howard Hughes, the notorious billionaire recluse. The poem has a cast of characters, including Lil, Levi Straus, Slinger and horse, who projected multiple points of view into the poem. Multiple voice was not new to American long poems. It can be found in Leaves of Grass and Paterson, for example, but the use of multiple points of view using different vocabularies is another matter. Dorn picked up the jargon of the day, the language of the drug culture, the language of western towns, saloons, and cowboys--in short the language of the ordinary transformed into the metaphor of the mock heroic. Earlier he had published a book called the Shonshoneans, with photographs by Leroy Lucas (1966), which was a documentary of the Indians along the Wind River in Wyoming; and later Recollections of Gran Apacheria, which chose the tragedy of the hunting down of Geronimo as its subject. With Gordon Brotherston, he published Image of the New World: The American Continent Portrayed in Native Texts (1979), which sought out and translated Indian narrative and stories about the Western lands. Dorn considered Indians as belonging to the geography of the West, which means Indians are also part of the imagination of the geography of the West. Post-war American poetry was dominated by poets in colleges and universities. Robert Penn Warren, one of the fugitive group, is the most written about writer of the period. Robert Lowell's first book, The Land of Unlikeness, contained a preface by Allen Tate, so he could trace his roots to the Southern New Critics and then back to T.S. Eliot. Eliot, in fact, was and is the single most authoritative critic and poet of modern American literature. His book Selected Essays (1932) formed the basis of Ransom's The New Criticism, and Brook and Warren's Understanding Poetry. Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Elizabeth Bishop, who were his students, are still the subjects of many critical studies. American poetry entered the universities and the workshops; then produced a political structure which sustained a kind of personal lyric, a post-confessional poem, so to speak. The poets were produced by workshops and then went to on other universities to teach more poets in workshops, as well as to edit magazines which published poems by poets from other workshops. This line is considered by many to be the main line of American poetry, and its authority has been sustained by such critics as Helen Hennessy Vendler, Norman Bloom, and John Hollander. The Norton Anthology of American Poetry is one result of the views of this version of literary history. William Carlos Williams is scantily represented, Louis Zukofsky and the whole objectivist movement has been eliminated, and Charles Olson is absent. The same attitudes prevail in the recently published Columbia History of American Poetry (1993) edited by Jay Parini. At this point, the exclusion of Black poetry, Native American poetry, Chicano poetry is close to being criminal, and the exclusion of women poets as well as poets from the avant-garde academically irresponsible.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • April 2005 Updrafts
    Chaparral from the California Federation of Chaparral Poets, Inc. serving Californiaupdr poets for over 60 yearsaftsVolume 66, No. 3 • April, 2005 President Ted Kooser is Pulitzer Prize Winner James Shuman, PSJ 2005 has been a busy year for Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. On April 7, the Pulitzer commit- First Vice President tee announced that his Delights & Shadows had won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. And, Jeremy Shuman, PSJ later in the week, he accepted appointment to serve a second term as Poet Laureate. Second Vice President While many previous Poets Laureate have also Katharine Wilson, RF Winners of the Pulitzer Prize receive a $10,000 award. Third Vice President been winners of the Pulitzer, not since 1947 has the Pegasus Buchanan, Tw prize been won by the sitting laureate. In that year, A professor of English at the University of Ne- braska-Lincoln, Kooser’s award-winning book, De- Fourth Vice President Robert Lowell won— and at the time the position Eric Donald, Or was known as the Consultant in Poetry to the Li- lights & Shadows, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2004. Treasurer brary of Congress. It was not until 1986 that the po- Ursula Gibson, Tw sition became known as the Poet Laureate Consult- “I’m thrilled by this,” Kooser said shortly after Recording Secretary ant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. the announcement. “ It’s something every poet dreams Lee Collins, Tw The 89th annual prizes in Journalism, Letters, of. There are so many gifted poets in this country, Corresponding Secretary Drama and Music were announced by Columbia Uni- and so many marvelous collections published each Dorothy Marshall, Tw versity.
    [Show full text]
  • In the Final Two Years of His Life John Berryman Completed Two Collections of Poems – Love & Fame and Delusions, Etc
    LOVE & FAME AND THE SELF IN SOCIETY PHILIP COLEMAN In the final two years of his life John Berryman completed two collections of poems – Love & Fame and Delusions, Etc. – and he brought close to conclusion the novel Recovery, which was published posthumously in 1973. In a letter to Robert Giroux in May 1971 he described his “Present plan” in the following way: 1) vol. Essays/stories – Spr. ’72 2) Delusions, Etc. – Fall ’72 3) Recovery (the novel) – ’73? 4) Shakespeare’s Reality – ’74? 5) The Blue Book of Poetry (ed.) 6?) I am also doing a Life of Christ for Martha [Berryman’s daughter]: illustrated – e.g. Titian’s great “Scourging” in the Pinakothek.1 Berryman’s activity and output during this period of his life is remarkable for a number of reasons, not least because he spent a great deal of this time in hospital undergoing treatment for alcoholism, as well as carrying out his duties as Regents’ Professor of Humanities at the University of Minnesota. It is interesting too because, much to the poet’s dismay, the reception of The Dream Songs had more or less decided his critical fate, as Robert Lowell implied when he wrote that Berryman’s “last two books, Love & Fame and Delusions, Etc., move” but only insofar as “they fill out the frame” of The Dream 1 Quoted by Robert Giroux in the Preface to John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, viii. 226 Philip Coleman Songs and “prepare for his [Berryman’s] death”.2 Lowell’s remark is problematic for a number of reasons, but mainly because it suggests that the work Berryman produced in the last few years of his life in some sense pre-empted or prophesied his death by suicide in January 1972.
    [Show full text]
  • Chicken Paprika and Tug of War: the Romantic "Dream Song 4" by John Berryman Patrick Connell College of the Holy Cross
    The Criterion Volume 2019 Article 4 2019 Chicken Paprika and Tug of War: the Romantic "Dream Song 4" by John Berryman Patrick Connell College of the Holy Cross Follow this and additional works at: https://crossworks.holycross.edu/criterion Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, and the Rhetoric and Composition Commons Recommended Citation Connell, Patrick (2019) "Chicken Paprika and Tug of War: the Romantic "Dream Song 4" by John Berryman," The Criterion: Vol. 2019 , Article 4. Available at: https://crossworks.holycross.edu/criterion/vol2019/iss1/4 This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by CrossWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in The rC iterion by an authorized editor of CrossWorks. !37 Connell Chicken Paprika Chicken Paprika and Tug of War: the Romantic “Dream Song 4” by John Berryman Patrick Connell College of the Holy Cross Class of 2022 IN JOHN BERRYMAN’S “Dream Song 4” the speakers, Henry and Mr. Bones, oppose one another within the preconscious of a man suppressing his primal sexual desire in a restaurant. As stated by Helen Vendler, these archetypes of American minstrelsy roughly depict the Freudian Superego and Id (Vendler). The scene is narrated from Henry’s perspective with interjections only by the consciousness of his opposite, “Mr. Bones.” What takes place is the internal dialogue of a man brimming with jealousy and sexual desire, inhibited only by the colloquial rationalization of his Superego — the ideal self — and the repercussions of springing at “her compact & delicious body” (Berryman l.1) in front of her spouse and four others.
    [Show full text]
  • PDF Download William Carlos Williams: Selected Poems
    WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS: SELECTED POEMS PDF, EPUB, EBOOK William Carlos Williams,Robert Pinsky | 200 pages | 16 Oct 2014 | The Library of America | 9781931082716 | English | New York, United States William Carlos Williams: Selected Poems PDF Book Eliot, and John Berryman. In addition to including many more pieces, Tomlinson has organized the whole in chronological order. Nobody'll ever see the kid's name in print, anyway. He's humorous, energetic, and kind-hearted: "Flowers By the Sea" When over the flowery, sharp pasture's edge, unseen, the salt ocean lifts its form--chicory and daisies tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone but color and the movement--or the shape perhaps--of restlessness, whereas the sea is circled and sways peacefully upon its plantlike stem Here, to me, flowers represent individuals - lovely, fragile and cranky, who could be overtaken by life's greater considerations the ocean , but by some grace are left to live and grow. I will surely seek out more of his work when I get a chance. View 2 comments. That's exactly how slow going it was. I felt flames coming out of the poems some of them gentle which warmed up my day, and others very strong, which deeply penetrated inside some of my very painful wounds cauterizing them. From the Introduction by Randall Jarrell: "When you have read Paterson you know for the rest of your life what it is like to be a waterfall; and what other poet has turned so many of his readers into trees? Selected Poems by William Carlos Williams ,. Dec 13, Anima rated it it was amazing.
    [Show full text]
  • John Berryman and the American Legacy of Dylan Thomas
    GWASG PRIFYSGOL CYMRU UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS John Berryman and the American Legacy of Dylan Thomas How to Cite: Kurt Heinzelman, ‘John Berryman and the American Legacy of Dylan Thomas’, International Journal of Welsh Writing in English, 5 (2018), 1, DOI: 10.16995/ijwwe.5.5 Published: April 2018 Peer Review: This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of the International Journal of Welsh Writing in English, which is a journal of the University of Wales Press. Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s). This article is freely available to read but, for reasons of third-party content inclusion, is not openly licensed. Open Access: International Journal of Welsh Writing in English is a peer-reviewed open access journal. Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service. The University of Wales Press wishes to acknowledge the funding received from the Open Library of Humanities towards the cost of producing this open access journal. Heinzelman.indd 1 26/04/2018 09:03 Heinzelman.indd 2 26/04/2018 09:03 JOHN BERRYMAN AND THE AMERICAN LEGACY OF DYLAN THOMAS1 Kurt Heinzelman, The University of Texas at Austin Abstract Lost in the celebration of the 2014 Dylan Thomas centenary was why Thomas’s reputation, at least among literary historians and particularly fellow poets, had declined so much in the nearly sixty years since his death. That those poets once influenced by Thomas – and they were legion – produced a kind of ‘Dylan Effect’, diluting what was once impressive is one thesis of this article, even as non- professional readers continue to this day to revere some of his work.
    [Show full text]
  • Feature Essay
    Civil War Book Review Fall 2001 Article 7 Feature Essay David Madden Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cwbr Recommended Citation Madden, David (2001) "Feature Essay," Civil War Book Review: Vol. 3 : Iss. 4 . Available at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cwbr/vol3/iss4/7 Madden: Feature Essay Feature Essay Madden, David Fall 2001 Melville, Herman REDISCOVERING CIVIL WAR CLASSICS:Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War: Civil War Poems. Prometheus Books, $13.00 ISBN 1573928933 A verse to the American Iliad In the very first weeks of the Civil War, poets started firing off poems, and the war has kept marching in millions of metric feet ever since. Most misfire. It is a scandal and a shame that so little great poetry came out of the Civil War. Although he wrote some of the finest Civil War poems (Civil War Poetry and Prose, Dover, ISBN 0486285073, $1.00 softcover), Walt Whitman himself said the war would remain unwritten. One wonders what the author of "The Wound-Dresser," "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night," and "Cavalry Crossing a Ford" thought of the war poems of his contemporaries, Whittier, Emerson, Lanier, Longfellow, Lowell, and especially of Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, published the year after the war ended. Let us not pretend that Civil War poetry appeals to more than a minority of people who take a great interest in the war these days. But one should insist that the possibilities are worth exploring. And Battle-Pieces is a good place to start.
    [Show full text]
  • John Berryman and the Poetics of Survival
    HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: JOHN BERRYMAN AND THE POETICS OF SURVIVAL ___________________________________________ A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College Ohio University ___________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English ___________________________________________ by Andreas Britz June 2010 Britz 1 Introduction John Berryman was fifty-seven years old when he leapt to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge on Friday, 7 January, 1972. Most of his friends and contemporaries had already gone before him; there was Randall Jarrell who stepped in front of a moving car on 14 October, 1965, and Dylan Thomas who had drank himself into a fatal stupor on 9 November 1953, and the beloved and brilliant Delmore Schwartz who died in obscurity in a cheap New York hotel on 11 July, 1966. Berryman’s untimely demise was sadly a predictable outcome for one of the finest specimens of America’s Middle Generation of poets. The so-called Middle Generation of poets of which Berryman was a part lived out their existence, at least initially, in the shadow of their Modernist predecessors such as T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. Berryman, like many of his contemporaries, was first indoctrinated in the style of late Modernist or 1940s period verse, exemplified perhaps by the famed English expatriate W.H. Auden. To say that Berryman’s early verse was unexceptional would be an understatement. Reviews of Berryman’s first two notable publications, Poems (1942), and The Dispossessed (1948) singled out for praise his admirable craftsmanship and awareness of tradition but denied him the compliment of innovation, insight, and feeling.
    [Show full text]
  • The Power of the Word Along the Great Road
    chapter one the power of the word along the Great Road Boston : in the beginning ◆ William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation was written near the Great Road long before there was such a road, and published in 1630. It’s still a fascinating read. The first American to publish a book of poems was Ann Bradstreet, in 1650. Born in Northamptonshire, England, she emigrated to Boston in 1630, as a founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Phyllis Wheatley was born in Africa and brought to America as a slave. Freed and living in Boston, she published a book of poems in 1773; she was the first African American to do so. The Word—the American English written word, in poems, sermons, memoirs, histo- ries—began in and near Boston, and swept west. Today, US 20 begins three miles west of Massachusetts Bay, in Ken- more Square, under the shadow of Fenway Park’s fabled left field wall, the “Green Monster.” In the 1950s, US 20 began two miles farther east, almost at the sea; at the west end of Boston’s Public Garden, next to Boston Common, the heart of the old city. It is tempting to deal with these historic places and their associations, but Boston is too big a subject for a book about a highway that simply starts west from there. Dozens of major American writers have significant connections to Boston or Cambridge, often through Harvard University: Cotton Mather, Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, John Berryman (whose poem pays “Homage to Mistress Brad- street”), Robert Creeley, John Ashberry, Frank O’Hara, Robert Bly, Kenneth Koch, George Plimpton, Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, and so 1 © 2008 State University of New York Press, Albany 2 ◆ twenty west on and on.
    [Show full text]
  • BERRYMAN, JOHN, 1914-1972 John Berryman Collection,1956-1990
    BERRYMAN, JOHN, 1914-1972 John Berryman collection,1956-1990 Emory University Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library Atlanta, GA 30322 404-727-6887 [email protected] Descriptive Summary Creator: Berryman, John, 1914-1972 Title: John Berryman collection,1956-1990 Call Number: Manuscript Collection No. 1225 Extent: .25 linear ft. (1 box) Abstract: Collection of materials relating to American poet and scholar John Berryman, including correspondence, poems and printed material. Language: Materials entirely in English. Administrative Information Restrictions on Access Unrestricted access. Terms Governing Use and Reproduction All requests subject to limitations noted in departmental policies on reproduction. Related Materials in Other Repositories John Berryman papers, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Source Purchased from James S. Jaffe Rare Books, 2012. Additions were purchased from Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in 2012 and 2014. Custodial History Purchased from dealer, provenance unknown. Citation [after identification of item(s)], John Berryman collection, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. Emory Libraries provides copies of its finding aids for use only in research and private study. Copies supplied may not be copied for others or otherwise distributed without prior consent of the holding repository. John Berryman collection, 1956-1990 Manuscript Collection No. 1225 Appraisal Note Acquired by Curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, Kevin Young, as part of the Rose Library's holdings in American literature. Processing Processed by Sarah Quigley, 2012. This finding aid may include language that is offensive or harmful. Please refer to the Rose Library's harmful language statement for more information about why such language may appear and ongoing efforts to remediate racist, ableist, sexist, homophobic, euphemistic and other oppressive language.
    [Show full text]
  • Ethnicity, Lyricism, and John Berryman's Dream Songs
    UC Santa Barbara Journal of Transnational American Studies Title Imaginary Jews and True Confessions: Ethnicity, Lyricism, and John Berryman's Dream Songs Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4035s7ss Journal Journal of Transnational American Studies, 1(1) Author Gross, Andrew S. Publication Date 2009-02-16 DOI 10.5070/T811006942 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Imaginary Jews and True Confessions: Ethnicity, Lyricism, and John Berryman’s Dream Songs ANDREW GROSS . Jews, who have changed much in the course of history, are certainly no race, [but] the anti‐Semites in a way are a race, because they always use the same slogans, display the same attitudes, indeed almost look alike. —Max Horkheimer1 John Berryman’s “The Imaginary Jew,” published in the Kenyon Review of 1945, is in some ways a rather programmatic account of one man’s conversion from parlor anti‐ Semitism to a feeling of solidarity with Jews. The climax occurs when a bigot accuses the narrator of being Jewish in order to discredit him in an argument over Roosevelt’s foreign policy prior to the American entry into World War II. The accusation completely unnerves the narrator in ways he does not immediately understand, and he is shocked to see that it discredits him in the eyes of the crowd, which has assembled at Union Square to hear impromptu debates. Later, after leaving the scene of his embarrassment, he decides to lay claim to this mistaken, or imaginary, identity, and comes to the following conclusion about the nature of prejudice: “My persecutors were right: I was a Jew.
    [Show full text]
  • BERRYMAN and LOWELL: the ART of LOSING Berrytnan and Lo-Well
    BERRYMAN AND LOWELL: THE ART OF LOSING Berrytnan and Lo-well The Art of Losing Stephen Matterson M MACMILLAN PRESS © Stephen John Matterson 1988 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1988 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1988 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Typeset by Wessex Typesetters (Division of The Eastern Press Ltd) Frome, Somerset British Library Cataloguing in Publication Dat a Matterson, Stephen Berryman and Lowell: the art of losing. 1. Lowell, Robert-Criticism and interpretation 2. Berryman, John­ Criticism and interpretation I. Title 811'.52 PS3523.089Z/ ISBN 978-1-349-09018-1 ISBN 978-1-349-09016-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-09016-7 For Jean with all of my love Contents Acknowledgements ix Chronologies xi Introduction: Tumbles and Leaps 1 1 Beginning in Wisdom 15 2 Towards a Rhetoric of Destitution 35 3 Excellence and Loss 51 4 History and Seduction 70 5 Defeats and Dreams 92 Notes and References 107 Index 111 Vll Acknowledgements I should like to thank Frances Arnold, my editor at Macmillan, and the outside reader whose advice and comments helped to shape the book.
    [Show full text]
  • Mutual Implications Otherness in Theory and John Berryman's Poetry
    Mutual Implications Otherness in Theory and John Berryman’s Poetry of Loss Elias Schwieler Umeå 2003 Mutual Implications Otherness in Theory and John Berryman’s Poetry of Loss Elias Schwieler Skrifter från moderna språk 9 Institutionen för moderna språk Umeå universitet 2003 Umeå universitet SE-901 87 Umeå universitet Tfn. +46 90 786 51 38 Fax. +46 90 786 60 23 http://www.mos.umu.se/forskning/publikationer Skrifter från moderna språk 9 Umeå universitet ISSN 1650-304X Skriftseriens redaktör: Raoul J. Granqvist © 2003 Elias Schwieler Omslag: Francis Bacon, “Figure Writing Reflected in a Mirror” (1976). © Francis Bacon/BUS 2003 Tryckt av Print & Media, Umeå universitet 2003:304049 ISBN 91-7305-450-X ISSN 1650-304X ἐδιζησάµην ἐµεωυτόν (I searched myself) Heraclitus, Fragment 101 Contents Acknowledgements.......................................................................................................... 8 Introduction.......................................................................................................................... 9 Shoshana Felman’s Theory of Mutual Implications ........................................................ 10 Commentary, Dialogue, and the Other............................................................................. 13 Previous Research ............................................................................................................ 21 Departure...................................................................................................................... 21 The Subversive............................................................................................................
    [Show full text]