Twentieth Century Poetry Selves and Situations

by Robinson, Peter

• ISBN13: 9780199273256
• ISBN10: 0199273251
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-02-24
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Peter Robinson's third book of literary criticism presents a sequence of chapters exploring ways that selves and situations interact and become imaginatively identified with each other in poems. Readings of works by Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, Louis MacNeice, W. S. Graham, Elizabeth Bishop,Allen Curnow, Charles Tomlinson, Mairi MacInnes, Tom Raworth, and Roy Fisher share an interest in how poems can be both attached to, and detached from, the culture, society, and conditions in which they were written. These studies draw out and underline both the ubiquity and elusiveness of the selfin the situation of the text. The poems studied here are also discussed as focal points for relations between readerly and writerly selves and their situations in and over time.

Table of Contents

Selves and Situations	1	(21)
Not a Villanelle: Pound's Psychological Hour	22	(17)
Basil Bunting's Emigrant Ballads	39	(10)
MacNeice, Munich, and Self-Sufficiency	49	(20)
Dependence in the Poetry of W.S. Graham	69	(30)
Elizabeth Bishop's Art	99	(17)
``The bliss of what?': Bishop's Crusoe	116	(19)
Allen Curnow Travels	135	(29)
Charles Tomlinson in the Golfo dei Poeti	164	(23)
`Absolute circumstance': Mairi MacInnes	187	(19)
Tom Raworth and the Pop Art Explosion	206	(24)
Roy Fisher's Last Things	230	(31)
Bibliography	261	(16)
Index	277