Approaching post-World War II poetry from a postmodern critical perspective, this study challenges the prevailing assumption that experimental forms signify political opposition while traditional forms are politically conservative. It defines postmodern poetry as a break with modernism's valorization of technique and its implicit collusion with technological progress. It shows how four major postwar poets Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and James Merrill cannot be read as politically conservative because formally traditional or as culturally oppositional because formally...

Lyric poetry has long been regarded as the intensely private, emotional expression of individuals, powerful precisely because it draws readers into personal worlds. But who, exactly, is the "I" in a lyric poem, and how is it created? In Lyric Poetry, Mutlu Blasing argues that the individual in a lyric is only a virtual entity and that lyric poetry takes its power from the public, emotional power of language itself.

In the first major new theory of the lyric to be put forward in decades, Blasing proposes that lyric poetry is a public discourse deeply rooted in the mother...

Approaching post-World War II poetry from a postmodern critical perspective, this study challenges the prevailing assumption that experimental forms signify political opposition while traditional forms are politically conservative.

The chapbook of the Second Annual Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival opens with the Festival's invited speaker, the renowned literary translator of Hikmet and a scholar of literature, Professor Mutlu Konuk Blasing of Brown University. Her analysis, "Nazim Hikmet: The Forms of Exile" establishes important insights about Hikmet's poetry of exile as reflected in the poet's mixed use of traditional and free verse forms. The rest of the chapbook is dedicated to poems submitted by the winners of the poetry competition. The competition received over five hundred poems from one hundred seventy poets...

Autobiographical literature especially reveals the processes by which writers convert their own historical experience into fictional form and suggests how literary forms function in life. This volume defines an original theory of autobiographical writing and provides intriguing analyses of major American works of literature.

The Art of Life examines the transformation of history into literature in Walden, "Song of Myself," Henry James's Prefaces, The Education of Henry Adams, Paterson, and the poetry of Frank O'Hara. These works...