American Poetry after Modernism: The Power of the Word

by Albert Gelpi

Overview

Albert Gelpi's American Poetry after Modernism is a study of major poets of the postwar period from Robert Lowell and Adrienne Rich through the Language poets. He argues that what distinguishes American poetry from the British tradition is, paradoxically, the lack of a tradition; as a result, each poet has to ask fundamental questions about the role of the poet and the nature of the medium, has to invent a language and form for his or her purposes. Exploring this paradox through detailed critical readings of the work of fourteen poets, Gelpi presents an original and insightful argument about late twentieth century American poetry and about the historical development of a distinctively American poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107025240
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/09/2015
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.09(h) x 0.98(d)

About the Author

Albert Gelpi is Professor Emeritus of American Literature at Stanford University, California. His previous books include Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet (1971), The Tenth Muse (Cambridge, 1991), and A Coherent Splendor (Cambridge, 1988). Gelpi has also edited the work of, and written criticism on, a wide range of poets, including Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, and William Everson. The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov (2003), co-edited with Robert Bertholf, won an award from the MLA as the best scholarly edition of a literary correspondence. Gelpi continues to teach in the Stanford Continuing Studies Program.

Table of Contents

1. Twentieth-century poetics: an overview; 2. The language of crisis: Robert Lowell and John Berryman; 3. The language of flux: Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery; 4. The language of incarnation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Everson; 5. The language of witness: Adrienne Rich; 6. The language of vision: Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan; 7. The language of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: Robert Creeley, Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, Robert Grenier, Susan Howe, and Fanny Howe.