Re-making it New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition

by Lynn Keller

• ISBN13: 9780521106771
• ISBN10: 052110677X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-04-02
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

As a tradition modernism has fostered particularly polarised impulses - though the great modernist poems offer impressive models, modernist principles, epitomised in Ezra Pound's exhortation to 'make it new', encourage poets to reject the methods of their immediate predecessors. Re-making it New explores the impact of this polarised tradition on contemporary American poets by examining the careers of John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Creeley and James Merrill. To demonstrate how these four have extended modernist attitudes to create a distinctive post-modern art, each one's poetry is compared with that of a modernist who has been an important influence: Ashbery is discussed in conjunction with Wallace Stevens, Bishop with Marianne Moore, Creeley with William Carlos Williams and Merrill with W. H. Auden. Lynn Keller's book shows that contemporary poets have chosen not to reach for order as their modernist predecessors did; instead, they attempt to dissolve hierarchical distinction and polarising categories in a modest spirit of accommodation and acceptance.

Table of Contents

Introduction: 'Unless there is/ a new mind there cannot be a new/ line': the modernist inheritance

'Thinkers without final thoughts': the continuity between Stevens and Ashbery

'We must, we must be moving on': Ashbery's divergence from Steven's modernism

'Piercing glances into the life of things': the continuity between Moore and Bishop

'Resolved, dissolved ... in that watery, dazzling dialectic': Bishop's divergence from Moore and modernism

'A small (or large) machine made of words': the continuity between Williams and Creeley

'Let/ go, let go of it': Creeley's divergence from Williams and modenrism

'Those who love illusion/ And know it': the continuity between Auden and Merrill

'I knew/ That life was fiction in disguise': Merrill's divergence from Auden and modernism

Conclusion: 'The possibility of free declamation anchored/ To a dull refrain': the postmodernist estate

Notes

Index

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