DOCSLIB.ORG

Paul Mariani

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Paul Mariani the boisi center interviews no. 28: November 19, 2008 paul mariani is a professor of English at Boston College and the author of such literary biog- raphies as Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life (2008) and The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane (1999). He spoke with Boisi Center associate director Erik Owens before his presentation on writing biography at the Boisi Center. owens: So, one of the things that has For a time in the 1940s, Lowell was a At least four of the poets I’ve written struck me about the subjects of your convert and then had—after his di- about did suffer from manic depression, biographies in the past—William Carlos vorce—left the church, and a kind of exis- or what we call now a bipolar disorder. I Williams, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, tential nihilism came to take its place, so wonder how many people, though, don’t Hopkins and Berryman – is that most, that his vision of the world and of the self experience some kind of deep depres- if not all of them, suffered from depres- got darker and darker. Poetry served as sion in their lives. I think we all, at some sion of some sort. Is that a poetic license point, experience a sense of major loss, of sorts? Is that an affliction that poets etc. And there are points where we feel deal with more than other people? In ebullient, too. I’m not saying that that’s your biographical work, how do you see clinical manic depression, but at least the relationship between depression and we understand something of what those creativity? states are. mariani: What I think happens is that owens: Does the creativity precede or those who are creative and also are prone stem from these periods—the depression to manic depression find in poetry or and recovery and ebullience that you writing or art or music a way of stabi- speak about? Are they tethered together? lizing that. It becomes a help for them, For me, to the extent that I’ve felt those and it evens out the effects of some of emotions, it hasn’t resulted in an extraor- their highs and lows. There are levels dinary flourishing of my own creative of manic depression, some more severe work. than others. Lowell, of the five that I’ve mariani: That’s well put. What I’m done, suffered the most the highest man- talking about here are writers. The ic episodes and the lowest depressions. urgency of creativity has to be there. In Once he underwent medical treatment, his mainstay. If he couldn’t have religion, each case, of course, these were writ- he would struggle courageously to get at least he had poetry and could shape an ers before the onslaught or the visible out from under the depression, and that’s inner order for himself. This is what he onslaught of manic depression episodes. when a lot of the poetry came to be writ- tried to do over and over again, including Lowell was already writing for a number ten. It was a way of stabilizing himself writing a book of blank verse sonnets of years before he suffered his first manic by profoundly searching himself. If you modestly called History. In it he asks: depressive bout, and I think that’s true of were to put it into spiritual terms, it was how do I shape human history? How do I all of these. Hopkins speaks of melan- a kind of kenosis or emptying of the shape it from a perspective which seems cholic fits. Hart Crane and Berryman self and then trying to fill that void with true to my own experience? It’s a very of being in hell and part way back. The something larger than one’s self-preoccu- dark perspective, but there it is. thing is, they ask, is this: how can I use pations. this ordering of words to order a world 1 the boisi center interview: paul mariani vertiginously and terrifyingly going out example, the life of Hopkins or Emily that might not be progressive, that may of whack? Dickinson or Wallace Stevens, where a be instead somehow random? great deal is happening, but in the inte- I don’t know if you’re born a writer, but mariani: You know, I’m not so sure rior space of the mind and the heart. On these five were writers before they experi- that the Beats really did live random lives. the other hand take Villon or Rimbaud or enced these manic episodes. Now, a clini- If you look at Ginsberg or if you look at Hart Crane or Berryman or Dylan Thom- cal psychologist might say that the manic Kerouac or if by extension Robert Creeley as or Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath or depression or the bipolarity was there. or if you look at Gary Snyder—I’m not Anne Sexton, where much of the drama That it just hadn’t manifested itself in a sure which ones you want to go with unfolds out there, on the streets of New clinically recognizable form yet. I don’t but—Beat doesn’t just mean a kind of York or Paris in the 1920s, or Mexico City know the answer to that. Was it there in empty vacuity. You get that with minor in the 1930s, to be set down and record- some nascent form, perhaps? The thing figures, but for them the word is in- ed. Those poets are living on the edge, is that they are poets and identify them- formed with the sense Kerouac gave it: of selves as poets, and then they have to find a kind of beatitude. So, there’s a kind of a way to deal with their condition in and journey implied there, towards Nirvana through their poetry. or some safe haven. owens: One of the things that struck “I think most Now, at one level the journey may be that me in some of your work is that you have people have a you get in a car with Kerouac and Cassidy such a thoughtful perspective on the and you drive from New York out to the art of biography. It makes me wonder sense that they’re West Coast. When you get out to the West if you—as a religious person and as a Coast, what can you do but drive back to biographer—have a trajectory or a tone to on a journey the East Coast. But I don’t think that’s your way of seeing? Like colors that work of some sort, the deepest Kerouac. That’s certainly not together in a large canvas to present some the deepest Ginsberg. There is a sense sort of a coherent or meaningful picture that their life is of a journey, of an unfolding. Now, I or a feeling or a meaning to a life? Is can’t say specifically or deeply what it is there in fact coherence to a single life that unfolding into in each of those cases. I would have to can be seen only by someone else looking spend a lot of time before I felt confident back over that life, when in fact it is the something like to say what that journey was, but I’ll tell very lack of coherence that constitutes the a recognizable you this. In all five cases, in all the biog- human condition on a day-to-day basis? raphies that I’ve done, I have found that there was a journey, a sense of journey. mariani: Wow! I think most people shape...that’s Surely in the directions they saw their have a sense that they’re on a journey of why stories are poetry unfolding. some sort, that their life is unfolding into something like a recognizable shape, or important to us.” The biographer can articulate that. The so they would hope. That’s why stories biographer can stand back. He can see, or are so important to us. Everybody wants she can see, what’s happened in 20, 30, to tell his or her story, or—if not their 40 years and see a trajectory. Is the trajec- and we find their broken, Romantic lives own—then the stories of others. Moses, tory nothing more than a rocket burst in pulling us after them. Most people think David, Achilles, Ulysses, Julius Caesar, its randomness? I don’t think so. Cer- of such lives as a kind of journey, even Jesus of Nazareth, Paul of Tarsus, Au- tainly what the poet wants is to be able if a journey over the edge into the abyss. gustine, Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln, to write the lines that need to be written, If you lose the sense that life is worth Jesse James, Teddy Roosevelt, Eleanor and written with an urgency most people living, if the quotidian becomes a dizzy- Roosevelt, McCain, Obama. We never get will not understand. But those lines are ing randomness for you, if it really does tired of stories, do we? And some of the what give the poet the sense that some- devolve like a flushed urinal into chaos, stories are really way out to lunch, like thing significant has been said. Even there’s a very good chance that you’ll go the stories of mass murderers or serial when Berryman didn’t feel as comfort- down with it. killers or con men or flesh eaters, and able with his later work as he had with then there are other stories that from owens: So, how does this relate to the the best of his Dream Songs, he needed the outside look as if nothing happened, Beat mentality in terms of a journey in something, it was very important that he where it’s all an interior drama.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage
    The Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage October 2016 From the Desk of Fr. Mark Bosco, S.J. Dear Colleagues and Friends, This semester the Hank Center inaugurates a faculty seminar called All Things Ignatian: Catholic Intellectual Life and the Common Good. The purpose of this nine- course seminar is to engage our faculty more deeply in the interplay of faith, reason, and justice in light of the rich heritage of Catholic social thought. Led by fellow faculty who have shared commitments in studying the Jesuit tradition and the Catholic intellectual mission of the university, the seminar covers such issues as the history of Ignatius of Loyola and the Society of Jesus, Ignatian humanism, the relationship between Catholic faith and the arts and sciences, and issues of social and environmental justice. We hope this seminar enlivens our faculty to see their own contributions to this 450-year history of Jesuit higher education. Invitations for faculty to join the next seminar in the spring will be coming out shortly. The Hank Center moves in a decidedly literary direction with two exciting events this month. On October 12, the poet, critic, and biographer, Paul Mariani, joins us to teach a graduate seminar on the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and offer a public lecture on the American poet Wallace Stevens. Mariani's new biography, The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens (2016), has won great acclaim. And on October 20, Phil Klay, the Jesuit-educated war veteran and award-winning author of short stories, Redeployment (2015), offers his perspective on religious faith and modern warfare.
    [Show full text]
  • Wordplay in William Carlos Williams's Poetry
    Connotations Vol. 14.1-3 (2004/2005) “These things astonish me beyond words”: Wordplay in William Carlos Williams’s Poetry MARGIT PETERFY —and I? […] whistle a contrapuntal melody to my own fugue!1 A poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets.2 Wordplay, in terms of its reception, may be immediately obvious (because the reader expects it, or because it is clearly foregrounded as such in the text), or it may show its iridescent nature only on reread- ing, maybe with the help of additional information, in a moment of revelation. This revelation of something that is unsuspected qualifies in turn as a surprise. Unlike surprises in the real world, textual sur- prises are almost always pleasant, in that they tend to provoke an immediate, refreshing, almost somatic reaction; a moment of exhilara- tion, of discovery. So, when William Carlos Williams died in 1963, Denise Levertov wrote approvingly of his poetry: “One is forever coming across something new on pages one thought one had known long since.”3 Critical understanding of Williams’s work has explored many insightful directions since then, but there is still something new to come across. Although especially the early popular image of Wil- liams as a poet of ingenuous simplicity has been modified in recent decades,4 his recurring and systematic use of intricate and multivocal signification in the form of wordplay, mostly in puns, has, to my knowledge, not been documented so far.5 There seem to be three main reasons for critical insensitivity to puns and other kinds of wordplay in Williams’s work: (1) the suspicion that puns are, at best, a form of silly jokes, and, at worst, narcissistic, im- mature fabrications and vehicles of “pseudo-logic”;6 (2) the persistent notion of Williams as a poet whose passion is of the blood, not of the _______________ For debates inspired by this article, please check the Connotations website at <http://www.connotations.de/debpeterfy01413.htm>.
    [Show full text]
  • Writing Communities: Aesthetics, Politics, and Late Modernist Literary Consolidation
    WRITING COMMUNITIES: AESTHETICS, POLITICS, AND LATE MODERNIST LITERARY CONSOLIDATION by Elspeth Egerton Healey A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2008 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor John A. Whittier-Ferguson, Chair Associate Professor Kali A. K. Israel Associate Professor Joshua L. Miller Assistant Professor Andrea Patricia Zemgulys © Elspeth Egerton Healey _____________________________________________________________________________ 2008 Acknowledgements I have been incredibly fortunate throughout my graduate career to work closely with the amazing faculty of the University of Michigan Department of English. I am grateful to Marjorie Levinson, Martha Vicinus, and George Bornstein for their inspiring courses and probing questions, all of which were integral in setting this project in motion. The members of my dissertation committee have been phenomenal in their willingness to give of their time and advice. Kali Israel’s expertise in the constructed representations of (auto)biographical genres has proven an invaluable asset, as has her enthusiasm and her historian’s eye for detail. Beginning with her early mentorship in the Modernisms Reading Group, Andrea Zemgulys has offered a compelling model of both nuanced scholarship and intellectual generosity. Joshua Miller’s amazing ability to extract the radiant gist from still inchoate thought has meant that I always left our meetings with a renewed sense of purpose. I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to my dissertation chair, John Whittier-Ferguson. His incisive readings, astute guidance, and ready laugh have helped to sustain this project from beginning to end. The life of a graduate student can sometimes be measured by bowls of ramen noodles and hours of grading.
    [Show full text]
  • Catholic Imagination Conference Program
    Connecting, Researching, Communicating THE THIRD BIENNIAL The Joan and Bill Hank Center CATHOLIC IMAGINATION CONFERENCE Cfor the Catholic CIH Intellectual Heritage THE FUTURE OF THE CATHOLIC LITERARY TRADITION www.luc.edu/ccih/ Loyola University Chicago | September 19-21, 2019 FALL 2019 LAKE SHORE CAMPUS CAMPION HALL WEST LOYOLA AVENUE CROWN MERTZ SeanSean Earl Earl Field Field CENTER HALL Alfie Norville Practice Facility CUDAHY CTA NORVILLE LIBRARY RED LINE GENTILE ATHLETICS LOYOLA ARENA CENTER STATION DAMEN DUMBACH STUDENT HALL CENTER LOYOLA INFORMATION COMMONS Entrance to Fordham parking East Quad CUDAHY HALAS SCIENCE HALL SPORTS MADONNA DELLA FORDHAM West CENTER STRADA CHAPEL HALL Quad P UNIVERSITY BOOKSTORE NORTH SHERIDAN ROAD NORTH SHERIDAN GRANADA CUNEO CENTER HALL CAMPUS SAFETY OFFICE COFFEY HALL P MUNDELEIN QUINLAN LIFE CENTER SCIENCES SHUTTLE PIPER CENTER HALL STOP FLANNER HALL WELCOME CENTER DEVON AVENUE WEST SHERIDAN ROAD RALPH BVM HALL ARNOLD SULLIVAN FINE ARTS DE NOBILI CENTER FOR ANNEX HALL STUDENT SERVICES REGIS INSTITUTE OF HALL SIMPSON ENVIRONMENTAL LIVING- SUSTAINABILITY LEARNING CENTER NORTH SHERIDAN ROAD NORTH SHERIDAN NORTH KENMORE AVENUE NORTH WINTHROP AVENUE NORTH BROADWAY STREET NORTH BROADWAY ALUMNI HOUSE 1 Welcome Conference Attendees: A warm welcome to the Third Biennial Catholic Imagination Conference. In 2015, we inaugurated this unique conference in lovely Los Angeles; in 2017, we assembled in beautiful New York City for an inspired second iter- ation; today, we bring the conference to sweet home Chicago—the city of Big Shoulders, quick wit, and a robust Catholic culture. Our conference features over 80 writers, poets, filmmakers, playwrights, journalists, editors, publishers, stu- dents, and critics who will explore a variety of questions surrounding the Catholic imagination in literature and the arts.
    [Show full text]
  • The Personal Poetics of Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg
    MCNEES, MATTHEW J., Ph.D. Suffering and Liberation: The Personal Poetics of Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg. (2011) Directed by Drs. Keith Cushman and Anthony Cuda. 174 pp. This dissertation examines Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg’s personal poetry. While both poets attend to the random details of daily life, thereby establishing common ground as autobiographical writers, they differ markedly in their perspectives about the value of those details. Lowell possesses a stark, often nihilistic view, attesting to the irredeemable suffering of humanity; Ginsberg ascribes to a self-confident, sometimes larger-than-life persona, believing that complete freedom from fear is possible for everyone. My approach is roughly chronological, beginning when both poets committed themselves to personal, autobiographical poetry during the 1950s. The temporal frame of the study, with a few exceptions, spans from the early 1950s through the l970s. I give due attention to each poet’s “breakthrough” work in the 1950s--like Ginsberg’s Howl and Lowell’s Life Studies--but I also place both poets on a larger continuum that began before they wrote their breakthrough works and lasted beyond their initial success. I explain Lowell and Ginsberg’s place in the broader literary history of the modern poets that immediately preceded them. Each found the tenets of modern poetry limiting to his personal approach and found it necessary to resuscitate the value of individual, personal subjectivity, something that countered the prevailing notions of objective poetry as put forth most notably by T. S. Eliot. Lowell’s commitment to personal poetry came after he had already established his reputation in the 1940s, so his break into personal poetry was highly self-conscious; Ginsberg committed to it early and he never wavered in his approach.
    [Show full text]
  • THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY of AMERICA American Poetry at Mid
    THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA American Poetry at Mid-Century: Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of English School of Arts and Sciences Of The Catholic University of America In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy By Joan Romano Shifflett Washington, D.C. 2013 American Poetry at Mid-Century: Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell Joan Romano Shifflett, Ph.D. Director: Ernest Suarez, Ph.D. This dissertation explores the artistic and personal connections between three writers who helped change American poetry: Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell. All three poets maintained a close working relationship throughout their careers, particularly as they experimented with looser poetic forms and more personal poetry in the fifties and after. Various studies have explored their careers within sundry contexts, but no sustained examination of their relationships with one another exists. In focusing on literary history and aesthetics, this study develops an historical narrative that includes close-readings of primary texts within a variety of contexts. Established views of formalism, high modernism, and the New Criticism are interwoven into the study as tools for examining poetic structure within selected poems. Contexts concerning current criticism on these authors are also interlaced throughout the study and discussed in relation to particular historical and aesthetic issues. Having closely scrutinized the personal exchanges and creative output of all three poets, this study illuminates the significance of these writers’ relationships to American poetry at mid- century and beyond. Though the more experimental schools of poetry would not reach their height until the 1950s, by the 1940s Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell were already searching for a new aesthetic.
    [Show full text]
  • Wallace Stevens Poetry Pdf
    Wallace stevens poetry pdf Continue American poet Wallace StevensThivens in 1948 Bourne (1879-10-02)October 2, 1879Read, Pennsylvania, USA DiedAugust 2, 1955 (1955-08-02) (age 75)Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.OccupationPoet, Lawyer, Insurance ExecutivePeriod1914-1955Leat MovementConsy MovementConsying WorksHarmony Idea of Order on Ki WestMan with Blue GuitarAura AutumnModern PoetrySobert Frost Medal (1951)SpouseElsie Viola Cachel (m. 1909 -1955)ChildrenGolly Stevens (1924-1992)The signature of Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 - August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, he was educated at Harvard and then new York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive director at an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1955, he received the Pulitzer Prize for poems for collected poetry. Stevens' first writing period begins with his publication in 1923 of harmonium, followed by a somewhat revised and amended second edition in 1930. His second period occurred at eleven years old just before the publication of his Transport to the summer, when Stevens wrote three volumes of poems, including Ideas of Order, The Man with the Blue Guitar, Parts of the World, along with Transport to Summer. His third and final period of writing was the publication of Aurora Autumn in the early 1950s, and his Collected Poems was published in 1954, the year before his death. Among his most famous poems are The Aurora of Autumn, Anecdote Jara, Disappointment Ten Hours, Emperor Ice Cream, The Idea of Order on Key West, Sunday Morning, Snowman and Thirteen Ways to Look at a Black Bird. In 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania, he was born into a Lutheran family in the family of John Seller, his maternal great-grandfather, who settled in the Susquehanna Valley in 1709 as a religious refugee.
    [Show full text]
  • The Mystery of It All Paul Mariani
    Praise for THE MYSTERY OF IT ALL “To read the never prosaic, always poetic, prose of Paul Mariani’s The Mystery of It All is to feel called to action and then guided by a voice at once both lovingly personal and yet passionately prophetic, the voice of not just an intellectual but also a spiritual father. Readers, writers, teachers, and editors of literature informed by the Catholic intellectual tradition will find some of the most beautiful passages from centuries of great works of literature—that Mariani reminds us have become ‘fragments shored against . ruins’ and wants us to ‘piece together’ into ‘a complex, exciting, reworked, and re-vivifying mosaic,’ remembering to preserve ‘that sense of awe and wonder’ in the presence of the ‘incomprehensible certainty’ of the Mystery that ‘continues to beckon and burn.’” —MARY ANN B. MILLER, professor of English, Caldwell University; founding editor, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry “A profound tour de force, combining the passions of a great and generous literary mind with the self-interrogations of a pilgrim. I have long admired Paul Mariani’s extraordinary ability to engage and empathetically enter the interior lives of the poets he studies; his accomplishment and capacious scope is exemplary of what we have come to call the Catholic imagination, an imagination that demonstrates how each substantive voice serves to continue and to enhance the essential utterances of many.” —SCOTT CAIRNS, author of Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems and Anaphora: New Poems “Acclaimed as a biographer and poet, Paul Mariani is also revered as an exciting, learned, passionate teacher.
    [Show full text]
  • THE MYSTERY and the MAJESTY of IT Jesuit Spirituality in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
    7KH0\VWHU\DQGWKH0DMHVW\RI,W Jesuit Spirituality in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins 3$8/0$5,$1, 6800(5 7+(6(0,1$521-(68,763,5,78$/,7< The Seminar is composed of a number of Jesuits appointed from their prov- inces in the United States. The Seminar studies topics pertaining to the spiritual doctrine and practice of Jesuits, especially American Jesuits, and gathers current scholarly stud- ies pertaining to the history and ministries of Jesuits throughout the world. It then disseminates the results through this journal. The issues treated may be common also to Jesuits of other regions, other priests, religious, and laity. Hence, the studies, while meant especially for $PHULFDQ-HVXLWVDUHQRWH[FOXVLYHO\IRUWKHP2WKHUVZKRPD\ÀQGWKHP helpful are cordially welcome to read them at: [email protected]/jesuits . &855(170(0%(562)7+(6(0,1$5 Richard A. Blake, S.J., is chair of the Seminar and editor of STUDIES; he teach- HVÀOPVWXGLHVDW%RVWRQ&ROOHJH&KHVWQXW+LOO0DVV *X\&RQVROPDJQR6-LVSUHVLGHQWRIWKH9DWLFDQ2EVHUYDWRU\)RXQGDWLRQ LQ7XFVRQ$UL] Barton T. Geger, S.J., is rector of the Jesuit communities of St. Ignatius /R\RODSDULVKDQG5HJLV8QLYHUVLW\LQ'HQYHU&ROR 0LFKDHO +DUWHU 6- LV DVVLVWDQW GLUHFWRU RI WKH 8QLWHG 6WDWHV WHUWLDQVKLS SURJUDPLQ3RUWODQG2UH *UHJRU\$.DOVFKHXU6-LVLQWHULPGHDQRIWKH0RUULVVH\&ROOHJHDQG *UDGXDWH6FKRRORI$UWVDQG6FLHQFHVDW%RVWRQ&ROOHJH&KHVWQXW+LOO 0DVV *DVSHU)/R%LRQGR6-LV3URPRWHURI,JQDWLDQ,GHQWLW\DQGVXSHULRURIWKH FRPPXQLW\DW*RQ]DJD+LJK6FKRRO:DVKLQJWRQ'& William O’Neill, S.J. teaches social ethics at the Jesuit School of Theology at 6DQWD&ODUD8QLYHUVLW\6DQWD&ODUD&DO -RKQ56DFKV6-WHDFKHVWKHRORJ\DWWKH6FKRRORI7KHRORJ\DQG0LQLVWU\ DW%RVWRQ&ROOHJH&KHVWQXW+LOO0DVV The opinions expressed in STUDIES are those of the individual authors.
    [Show full text]
  • The Literary Criticism of Randall Jarrell
    INFORMATION TO USERS This was produced from a copy of a document sent to us for microfilming. While the most advanced technological means to photograph and reproduce this document have been used, the quality is heavily dependent upon the quality of the material submitted. The following explanation of techniques is provided to help you understand markings or notations which may appear on this reproduction. 1. The sign or "target" for pages apparently lacking from the document photographed is "Missing Page(s)". If it was possible to obtain the missing page(s) or section, they are spliced into the film along with adjacent pages. This may have necessitated cutting through an image and duplicating adjacent pages to assure you of complete continuity. 2. When an image on the film is obliterated with a round black mark it is an indication that the film inspector noticed either blurred copy because of movement during exposure, or duplicate copy. Unless we meant to delete copyrighted materials that should not have been filmed, you will find a good image of the page in the adjacent frame. 3. When a map, drawing or chart, etc., is part of the material being photo­ graphed the photographer has followed a definite method in "sectioning" the material. It is customary to begin filming at the upper left hand corner of a large sheet and to continue from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. If necessary, sectioning is continued again—beginning below the first row and continuing on until complete. 4. For any illustrations that cannot be reproduced satisfactorily by xerography, photographic prints can be purchased at additional cost and tipped into your xerographic copy.
    [Show full text]
  • American Poets Laureate, 1945-2015
    University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2015 State Verse Culture: American Poets Laureate, 1945-2015 Amy Paeth University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the American Studies Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Paeth, Amy, "State Verse Culture: American Poets Laureate, 1945-2015" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1928. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1928 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1928 For more information, please contact [email protected]. State Verse Culture: American Poets Laureate, 1945-2015 Abstract This dissertation argues that the state is the silent center of poetic production in the United States after WWII. “State Verse Culture” is the first history of the national poet, the Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress, whose office sits at the nexus of institutional actors of postwar poetry. Drawing on archival research at the Library of Congress and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, it traces the collusion of 1) federal bodies (The Library of Congress, The State Department, National Endowment for the Arts) with 2) literary-professional organizations (Poetry Society of America, Poetry magazine/The Poetry Foundation) and 3) private patrons (Paul Mellon, Ruth Lilly). The cooperation of public and private interests is crucial to the development of what I call state verse culture—recognizable at the first National Poetry Festival in 1962, and dominant following the end of the Cold War in the 1990s-2000s. Chapter 1, “State Verse Scandals: Views from Yaddo, St Elizabeths, and the Library of Congress, 1945-1956” narrates the Bollingen Prize controversy of 1949 and the arbitration of literary capital between the Library, Poetry magazine and the university system.
    [Show full text]
  • Wallace Stevens: Hartford's Private Poet
    Wallace Stevens: Hartford's Private Poet When Wallace Stevens moved to Hartford from New York in 1916 to work in the insurance business, he was well-known in poetry circles but not yet acclaimed as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. He had been married for seven years to a woman his family thought beneath him; they didn't attend the wedding. Elsie Kachel had been a milliner and a stenographer, and she posed as the model for the design of the Winged Liberty Head dime, which the U.S. minted from 1916 to 1945. Stevens had cut off ties with his parents. And, outside of poetry and his work at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., he also seemed to cut ties with the world. He didn't appear to care at all about the lack of attention from the press and often went out of his way to avoid it. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse awarded Stevens its most important prize for a group of poems in 1920, three years before his first book, "Harmonium," was published when he was 44 — but the honor went unnoticed in Hartford. Elsie does pop up in The Hartford Courant in 1920 as Mrs. Wallace Stevens, but only among a list of people who were assisting the chairman of the Hartford Musical Club — which was postponing its meeting. When The Dial magazine asked Stevens for a biographical sketch to accompany several poems that were to be published in 1922, he begged off: "Do, please, excuse me from the biographical note.
    [Show full text]