American Poetry Since 1945

ISBN-13: 9781137324450 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 256 str.

Eleanor Spencer

Opis

This book features a collection of essays on some of the key poets of post-war America, written by leading scholars in the field. All the essays have been newly commissioned to take account of the diverse movements in American poetry since 1945, and also to reflect, retrospectively, on some of the major talents that have shaped its development.In the aftermath of the Second World War, American poets took stock of their own tumultuous past but faced the future with radically new artistic ideals and commitments. More than ever before, American poetry spoke with its own distinctive accents and declared its own dreams and desires. This is the era of confessionalism, beat poetry, protest poetry, and avant-garde postmodernism. This book explores the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Plath, as well as contemporary African American poets and new poetic voices emerging in the twenty-first century. This New Casebook introduces the major American poets of the post-war generation, evaluates their achievements in the light of changing critical opinion, and offers lively, incisive readings of some of the most challenging and enthralling poetry of the modern era.

Spis treści

Introduction: 'I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear'; Eleanor Spencer.- PART I: POETS.- 1. 'Whims & emergencies, discoveries, losses': The Poetry of John Berryman; Stephen Matterson.- 2. Robert Lowell: Protean Poet; Steven Gould Axelrod.- 3. Making and Making Do: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop; Linda Anderson.- 4. Adrienne Rich: Poetry and Social Change; Wendy Martin and Lauren Morrison.- 5. 'A work of art that the critic cannot even talk about': The Poetry of John Ashbery; Eleanor Spencer.- 6. Sylvia Plath in the Early Twenty-First Century; Tracy Brain.- 7. 'You Asked Me to Sing Then You Seemed Not to Hear': African American Poetry since 1945; Lauri Ramey.- PART II: FORM AND GENRE.- 8. The Great Divide? Post-confessional and Language Poetry; Paul Batchelor.- 9. The Art of Exclusion: Form and Prosody in American Poetry Since 1970; David Caplan.- 10. The American Elegy; Stephen Regan.- PART III: MOVEMENTS AND MOMENTS.- 11. 'Singularly rich': Donald Allen's The New American Poetry 1945-1960; Rory Waterman.- 12. American Poetry Now, or, Not Quite The End Of The World; Stephen Burt .- Further Reading.- Index.

O autorze

Eleanor Spencer teaches in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, where she is also Vice-Principal and Senior Tutor at St Chad's College. She was previously a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow at Harvard University, USA.