The Line's Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight

by Elisa New

Overview

Is American vision implicitly possessive, as a generation of critics contends? By viewing the American poetic tradition through the prism of pragmatism, Elisa New contests this claim. A new reading of how poetry "sees," her work is a passionate defense of the power of the poem, the ethics of perception, and the broader possibilities of American sight.

American poems see more fully, and less invasively, than accounts of American literature as an inscription of imperial national ideology would allow. Moreover, New argues, their ways of seeing draw on, and develop, a vigorous mode of national representation alternative to the appropriative sort found in the quintessential American genre of encounter, the romance. Grounding her readings of Dickinson, Frost, Moore, and Williams in foundational texts by Edwards, Jefferson, Audubon, and Thoreau, New shows how varieties of attentiveness and solicitude cultivated in the early literature are realized in later poetry. She then discloses how these ideas infuse the philosophical notions about pragmatic experience codified by Emerson, James, and Dewey. As these philosophers insisted, and as New's readings prove, art is where the experience of experience can be had: to read, as to write, a poem is to let the line guide one's way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674534636
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	05/15/1999
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Elisa New is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Poetic Experience

Theories and Practices

Range-finding

Line's Eye, Lit Stream; Jefferson, Audubon, and Thoreau

Nature

The Force of the Fable: Thoreau, Dickinson, and Moore

So Much Depends: Audubon, Dickinson, and Williams

Culture

To Set the Voices Speaking: Jefferson, Williams, and Frost

Work, Works, Working: Edwards, Frost, and Moore

Notes

Works Cited

Index

What People are Saying About This

What you get in this challenging, engaging book is an argument about poetry that embraces, without embarrassment, poetry's ways of seeing. I think it has a great chance to redirect the whole enterprise of the academic discussion of poetry by elevating that actual and operant respect for poetry required in those who would presume to assess it.

Barton Levi St.Armand

There is a largeness of scope and vision to this book that has been missing from American cultural criticism for far too long a time; yet New also closely observes the minute particular. The resulting breakthrough, while it shatters some sacred vessels, also restores us to that basic sanity and grace that are the kinetic heritage of America's greatest writers, thinkers, poets, and critics.
— Barton Levi St.Armand, Brown University

Giles Gunn

Elisa New is out to challenge the presuppositions of much revisionist criticism of American writing by attempting to recuperate the notion of the aesthetic...Postulating an 'other American Protestantism,' she manages to give us the fullest elaboration we have yet had of a pragmatist tradition in American poetry.
— Giles Gunn, University of California, Santa Barbara

Mark Ford

Elisa New's searching analysis of the rhetoric of landscape brilliantly refutes current orthodoxies in American criticism. Her close readings of poems by such as Dickinson, Moore, Williams, and Frost demonstrate the powers of the critical mind uncannily alert to what John Ashbery has called 'the lumps and trials' of the poetic experience.
— Mark Ford, University College London

Allen Grossman

Elisa New's The Line's Eye is a glorious work: exuberant, learned, discriminate, purposeful, eloquent.
— Allen Grossman, Johns Hopkins University

Susan Howe

[Elisa New possesses a] clear and deep sympathy with the lyric gifts Protestant ethics can bestow and have already bestowed on our culture.
— Susan Howe, State University of New York, Buffalo

Martha Banta

In the hands of Elisa New's beautifully written study, the American Poem vibrates with 'the feel' of living in a land of substance and of experience in pursuit of itself.
— Martha Banta, University of California, Los Angeles

Albert J. von Frank

What you get in this challenging, engaging book is an argument about poetry that embraces, without embarrassment, poetry's ways of seeing. I think it has a great chance to redirect the whole enterprise of the academic discussion of poetry by elevating that actual and operant respect for poetry required in those who would presume to assess it.
— Albert J. von Frank, Washington State University

Editorial Reviews

There is a largeness of scope and vision to this book that has been missing from American cultural criticism for far too long a time; yet New also closely observes the minute particular. The resulting breakthrough, while it shatters some sacred vessels, also restores us to that basic sanity and grace that are the kinetic heritage of America's greatest writers, thinkers, poets, and critics.

Barton Levi St.Armand

If poetry is understood to be a "genre of experience," then one may all too easily see through genre to experience as if neither the formal nor the historical aspects of representation got in the way. Since they do, and since New knows that they do, the book must negotiate the obstacles to its own ambitions (her vision's nemeses and her romance's corrections) and so ends up taking just the path of most resistance that it admires in American thought.

Raritan - Virginia Jackson

What you get in this challenging, engaging book is an argument about poetry that embraces, without embarrassment, poetry's ways of seeing. I think it has a great chance to redirect the whole enterprise of the academic discussion of poetry by elevating that actual and operant respect for poetry required in those who would presume to assess it.

Albert J. von Frank

Elisa New's searching analysis of the rhetoric of landscape brilliantly refutes current orthodoxies in American criticism. Her close readings of poems by such as Dickinson, Moore, Williams, and Frost demonstrate the powers of the critical mind uncannily alert to what John Ashbery has called 'the lumps and trials' of the poetic experience.

Mark Ford

[Elisa New possesses a] clear and deep sympathy with the lyric gifts Protestant ethics can bestow and have already bestowed on our culture.

Susan Howe

In the hands of Elisa New's beautifully written study, the American Poem vibrates with 'the feel' of living in a land of substance and of experience in pursuit of itself.

Martha Banta

Elisa New's The Line's Eye is a glorious work: exuberant, learned, discriminate, purposeful, eloquent.

Allen Grossman

Elisa New is out to challenge the presuppositions of much revisionist criticism of American writing by attempting to recuperate the notion of the aesthetic...Postulating an 'other American Protestantism,' she manages to give us the fullest elaboration we have yet had of a pragmatist tradition in American poetry.

Giles Gunn

This volume [is] a longed-for return of positivism and appreciation after the dark scrutinies of new historicism...Altogether, New's is a masterpiece of critical writing: philosophically shrewd, beautifully articulate, calmly learned, endlessly surprising, deft in general and in detail...Surely of interest to students of US literature at all levels.

Choice - S. C. Dillon

What you get in this challenging, engaging book is an argument about poetry that embraces, without embarrassment, poetry's ways of seeing. I think it has a great chance to redirect the whole enterprise of the academic discussion of poetry by elevating that actual and operant respect for poetry required in those who would presume to assess it.

Albert J. Von Frank

If poetry is understood to be a "genre of experience," then one may all too easily see through genre to experience as if neither the formal nor the historical aspects of representation got in the way. Since they do, and since New knows that they do, the book must negotiate the obstacles to its own ambitions (her vision's nemeses and her romance's corrections) and so ends up taking just the path of most resistance that it admires in American thought.
— Virginia Jackson

Raritan

This volume [is] a longed-for return of positivism and appreciation after the dark scrutinies of new historicism...Altogether, New's is a masterpiece of critical writing: philosophically shrewd, beautifully articulate, calmly learned, endlessly surprising, deft in general and in detail...Surely of interest to students of US literature at all levels.
— S. C. Dillon

Choice