The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry Modernism and After

by Altieri, Charles

• ISBN13: 9781405121064
• ISBN10: 1405121068
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-03-24
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Written by a leading critic, this invigorating introduction to modernist American poetry conveys the excitement that can be generated by a careful reading of modernist poems. It encourages readers to confront the difficulties involved in tackling this literature and to identify with the modernistsrs" sense of the revolutionary possibilities of their art. Altierirs"s account embraces four generations of American poets, tracing the ambitions, the disillusionments and the continuities of modernist poetry through to the 1980s. He describes how the sense of liberation created by early modernist formal experiments was followed by disappointment as the limitations of these discoveries emerged. He contends that, in response, poets such as Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden reformulated modernist strategies to develop new ways for poetry to take social responsibility. Finally, he shows how these transformations were carried through by later poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich and Robert Creeley, with whom the narrative ends.

Author Biography

Charles Altieri is Stageberg Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His previous publications include The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (2003), Subjective Agency: A Theory of First-person Expressivity and its Social Implications (Blackwell, 1994), Postmodernism Now (1999), and Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (1990).

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	vi
List of Abbreviations	x
1 Introduction: The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: An Overview	1	(10)
2 The New Realism in Modernist Poetry: Pound and Williams	11	(41)
3 The Doctrine of Impersonality and Modernism's War on Rhetoric: Eliot, Loy, and Moore	52	(45)
4 How Modernist Poetics Failed and Efforts at Renewal: Williams, Oppen, and Hughes	97	(29)
5 The Return to Rhetoric in Modernist Poetry: Stevens and Auden	126	(31)
6 Modernist Dilemmas and Early Post-Modernist Responses	157	(58)
Notes	215	(14)
Works Cited	229	(5)
Further Reading	234	(9)
Index	243