Download or read book Poet Critics and the Administration of Culture written by Evan Kindley and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period between 1920 and 1950 saw an epochal shift in the American cultural economy. The shocks of the 1929 market crash and the Second World War decimated much of the support for high modernist literature, and writers who had relied on wealthy benefactors were forced to find new protectors from the depredations of the free market. Private foundations, universities, and government organizations began to fund the arts, and in this environment writers were increasingly obliged to become critics, elucidating and justifying their work to an audience of elite administrators. In Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture, Evan Kindley recognizes the major role modernist poet-critics played in the transition from aristocratic patronage to technocratic cultural administration. Poet-critics developed extensive ties to a network of bureaucratic institutions and established dual artistic and intellectual identities to appeal to the kind of audiences and entities that might support their work. Kindley focuses on Anglo-American poet-critics including T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Sterling A. Brown, and R. P. Blackmur. These artists grappled with the task of being “village explainers” (as Gertrude Stein described Ezra Pound) and legitimizing literature for public funding and consumption. Modernism, Kindley shows, created a different form of labor for writers to perform and gave them an unprecedented say over the administration of contemporary culture. The consequences for our understanding of poetry and its place in our culture are still felt widely today.
Download or read book Red Modernism written by Mark Steven and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-12-21 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did modernist poetry respond—both thematically and technically—to communism? In Red Modernism, Mark Steven asserts that modernism was highly attuned—and aesthetically responsive—to the overall spirit of communism. He considers the maturation of American poetry as a longitudinal arc, one that roughly followed the rise of the USSR through the Russian Revolution and its subsequent descent into Stalinism, opening up a hitherto underexplored domain in the political history of avant-garde literature. In doing so, Steven amplifies the resonance among the universal idea of communism, the revolutionary socialist state, and the American modernist poem. Focusing on three of the most significant figures in modernist poetry—Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky—Steven provides a theoretical and historical introduction to modernism’s unique sense of communism while revealing how communist ideals and references were deeply embedded in modernist poetry. Moving between these poets and the work of T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, and many others, the book combines a detailed analysis of technical devices and poetic values with a rich political and economic context. Persuasively charting a history of the avant-garde modernist poem in relation to communism, beginning in the 1910s and reaching into the 1940s, Red Modernism is an audacious examination of the twinned history of politics and poetry.
Download or read book American Poetry and Culture 1945 1980 written by Robert Von Hallberg and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the common perception of poets as standing apart from the mainstream of American culture, Robert von Hallberg gives us a fresh and unpredictable assessment of the poetry that has come directly out of the American experience since 1945. Who reads contemporary American poetry? More people than were reading new poetry in the 1920s, von Hallberg shows. How do poets respond to the public preoccupations of their readers? Often with fascination. Von Hallberg put the poems of Robert Creeley and John Ashbery together with the postwar outburst of systems analysis. The 1950s tourist poems of John Hollander, Adrienne Rich, W. S. Merwin, and James Merrill are treated as the cultural side of America's postwar rise to global political power There are chapters on the political poems of the 1950s and 1960s, and on Robert Lowell's sympathy for the imperialism of his liberal contemporaries. Poems of the 1970s on pop culture, especially Edward Dorn's Slinger, and some from the suburbs of the 1980s, are shown to reflect a curious peace between the literary and the mass cultures.
Download or read book Du Bois s Telegram written by Juliana Spahr and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1956 W. E. B. Du Bois was denied a passport to attend the Présence Africaine Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. So he sent the assembled a telegram. “Any Negro-American who travels abroad today must either not discuss race conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our State Department wishes the world to believe.” Taking seriously Du Bois’s allegation, Juliana Spahr breathes new life into age-old questions as she explores how state interests have shaped U.S. literature. What is the relationship between literature and politics? Can writing be revolutionary? Can art be autonomous, or is escape from nations and nationalisms impossible? Du Bois’s Telegram brings together a wide range of institutional forces implicated in literary production, paying special attention to three eras of writing that sought to defy political orthodoxies by contesting linguistic conventions: avant-garde modernism of the early twentieth century; social-movement writing of the 1960s and 1970s; and, in the twenty-first century, the profusion of English-language works incorporating languages other than English. Spahr shows how these literatures attempted to assert their autonomy, only to be shut down by FBI harassment or coopted by CIA and State Department propagandists. Liberal state allies such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations made writers complicit by funding multiculturalist works that celebrated diversity and assimilation while starving radical anti-imperial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist efforts. Spahr does not deny the exhilarations of politically engaged art. But her study affirms a sobering reality: aesthetic resistance is easily domesticated.
Download or read book Can Poetry Matter written by Dana Gioia and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When Dana Gioia's essay "Can Poetry Matter?" appeared in the Atlantic in 1991, it sparked a firestorm of debate and discussion over the role of the poet in today's world - a dialogue in which Gioia participated on radio, television, and in print. One of the more stimulating and provocative figures on our literary horizon, and the author of two widely praised books of poems, Gioia is also an essayist of wide renown." "This collection of essays demonstrates that Gioia's talents do not lie in the area of controversy alone. Can Poetry Matter? is an old-fashioned sort of literary book, part literary criticism, part social commentary, and part plain good reading. Addressing such subjects as the poet as businessman and New Formalism as the real avant-garde, it also includes pieces on the life and work of such diverse figures as Robinson Jeffers, Weldon Kees, Robert Bly, and Wallace Stevens." "In an age when literary discourse often seems either bleached of any real content or academic to the point of inaccessibility, the essays in Can Poetry Matter? are certain to educate, provoke, and, perhaps most of all, delight readers. They also establish Dana Gioia as one of the foremost cultural observers of his generation."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book The Poetics of Impersonality written by Maud Ellmann and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this classic work, Maud Ellmann examines T. S. Eliot's and Ezra Pound's criticism in terms of what she calls the 'poetics of impersonality'. Her superb and entirely original readings of the major poems of the modernist canon have earned a lasting place in criticism.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900 written by Daniel Morris and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-27 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century American Poetry and Politics shows how American poets have addressed political phenomena since 1900. This book helps students, teachers, and general readers make sense of the scope and complexity of the relationships between poetry and politics. Offering detailed case studies, this book discusses the relationships between poetry and social views found in work by well-established authors such as Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as lesser known, but influential figures such as Muriel Rukeyser. This book also emphasizes the crucial role contemporary African-American poets such as Claudia Rankine and leading spoken word poets play in documenting political themes in our current moment. Individual chapters focus on specific political issues - race, institutions, propaganda, incarceration, immigration, environment, war, public monuments, history, technology - in a memorable and teachable way for poetry students and teachers.
Download or read book Institutions of Modernism written by Lawrence S. Rainey and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This account of modernism and its place in public culture looks at where modernism was produced and how it was transmitted to particular audiences. The individual tales of figures like Joyce, Pound, Marinetti and Eliot provide perspectives on the larger story of modernism itself.
Download or read book Ethnic Modernism written by Werner Sollors and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Werner Sollors's monograph looks into how African American, European immigrant and other minority writers gave the United States its increasingly multicultural self-awareness, focusing on their use of the strategies opened up by modernism.
Download or read book Feeling as a Foreign Language written by Alice Fulton and published by . This book was released on 1999-03 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Feeling as a Foreign Language, Alice Fulton considers poetry's uncanny ability to access and recreate emotions so wayward they go unnamed. Fulton contemplates topics ranging from the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome to fractals from the aesthetics of complexity theory to the need for "cultural incorrectness." Along the way, she falls in love with an outrageous 17th century poet, argues for a Dickinsonian tradition in American letters, and calls for a courageous poetics of inconvenient knowledge.
Download or read book History Matters written by Ira Sadoff and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2009-04 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this capacious and energetic volume, Ira Sadoff argues that poets live and write within history, our artistic values always reflecting attitudes about both literary history and culture at large. History Matters does not return to the culture war that reduced complex arguments about human nature, creativity, identity, and interplay between individual and collective identity to slogans. Rather, Sadoff peels back layers of clutter to reveal the important questions at the heart of any complex and fruitful discussion about the connections between culture and literature. Much of our most adventurous writing has occurred at history’s margins, simultaneously making use of and resisting tradition. By tracking key contemporary poets—including John Ashbery, Olena Kaltyiak Davis, Louise Glück, Czeslaw Milosz, Frank O’Hara, and C. K. Williams—as well as musing on jazz and other creative enterprises, Sadoff investigates the lively poetic art of those who have grappled with late twentieth-century attitudes about history, subjectivity, contingency, flux, and modernity. In plainspoken writing, he probes the question of the poet’s capacity to illuminate and universalize truth. Along the way, we are called to consider how and why art moves and transforms human beings.
Download or read book Disappearing Ink written by Dana Gioia and published by MBI Publishing Company. This book was released on 2004-10 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a brilliant array of essays that tests the pulse of traditional and contemporary poetry, Gioia ("Can Poetry Matter?") ponders the future of the written word and how it might find its most relevant incarnation.
Download or read book The Advocates of Poetry written by R. S. Gwynn and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like no other period in American history, the twentieth century has produced a great flourishing of critics who not only wrote poetry, but also published criticism dealing directly with the text and aesthetics of poems. Beginning with John Crowe Ransom's "Wanted: An Ontological Critic" and closing with John Ciardi's "How Does a Poem Mean?", R. S. Gwynn has assembled many of the pivotal essays written by these poet-critics over the last fifty years, some long out of print. From the pens of a dozen authors, such as Robert Penn Warren, Louise Bogan, Allen Tate, Delmore Schwartz, and Randall Jarrell, the essays were written in an atmosphere of practicality. It was a time when critical readings of poetry elucidated the poem rather than the external ideologies and theories of the critic, when criticism was accessible to the educated, common reader.
Download or read book Part of Nature Part of Us written by Helen Vendler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of book reviews and essays on more than forty modern American poets.
Download or read book The Academic Avant Garde written by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The surprising story of the relationship between experimental poetry and literary studies. In The Academic Avant-Garde, Kimberly Quiogue Andrews makes a provocative case for the radical poetic possibilities of the work of literary scholarship and lays out a foundational theory of literary production in the context of the university. In her examination of the cross-pollination between the analytic humanities and the craft of poetry writing, Andrews tells a bold story about some of today's most innovative literary works. This pathbreaking intervention into contemporary American literature and higher education demonstrates that experimental poetry not only reflects nuanced concern about creative writing as a discipline but also uses the critical techniques of scholarship as a cornerstone of poetic practice. Structured around the concepts of academic labor (such as teaching) and methodological work (such as theorizing), the book traces these practices in the works of authors ranging from Claudia Rankine to John Ashbery, providing fresh readings of some of our era's most celebrated and difficult poets.
Download or read book Annotating Modernism written by Amanda Golden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-04 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making extensive use of archival materials by Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton, Amanda Golden reframes the relationship between modernism and midcentury poetry. While Golden situates her book among other materialist histories of modernism, she moves beyond the examination of published works to address poets’ annotations in their personal copies of modernist texts. A consideration of the dynamics of literary influence, Annotating Modernism analyzes the teaching strategies of midcentury poets and the ways they read modernists like T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and W. B. Yeats. Situated within a larger rethinking of modernism, Golden’s study illustrates the role of midcentury poets in shaping modernist discourse.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry written by Walter Kalaidjian and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-19 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry offers a critical overview of major and emerging American poets of the twentieth century.
