The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry

by York; Jake Adam

• ISBN13: 9780415970587
• ISBN10: 041597058X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-12-11
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The Architecture of Addresstraces the evolution of an American species of lyric capable of public pronouncement without polemic. Beginning with Whitman, Jake Adam York seeks to describe a kind of poem wherein the most ambitious poets--including Hart Crane and Robert Lowell--occupy and reconstruct important public spaces. This study argues that American poets become civic actors when their poems imagine and reconstruct the conceptual architecture of the monument.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Getting in the Way: The Architecture of Address	1	(18)
The Street or Ferry-boat or Public Assembly: Whitman and the Making of Monument	19	(78)
Crossing Over Brooklyn Ferry: The Bridge as Monument	97	(46)
In Common: Lowell, Whitman, Crane, and the Makings of a Mode	143	(30)
In Lowell's Wake, in Lowell's Way: The Monumental Mode in the Late Twentieth Century	173	(14)
Notes	187	(24)
Bibliography	211	(8)
Index	219