Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry

by Bonnie Costello

Overview

Just as the look of the American landscape has changed since the nineteenth century, so has our idea of landscape. Here Bonnie Costello reads six twentieth-century American poets who have reflected and shaped this transformation and in the process renovated landscape by drawing new images from the natural world and creating new forms for imagining the earth and our relation to it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674008946
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	03/30/2003
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.06(w) x 9.12(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Bonnie Costello, Professor of English at Boston University, is the general editor of The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore.

Table of Contents

1	Introduction: Frame and Flux	1
2	Frost's Crossings	19
3	Stevens' Eccentricity	53
4	Moore's America	86
5	Amy Clampitt: Nomad Exquisite	117
6	A. R. Ammons: Pilgrim, Sage, Ordinary Man	143
7	John Ashbery: Landscapeople	173
8	Epilogue: "The Machine in the Garden"	196
	Notes	203
	Works Cited	209
	Acknowledgments	217
	Index	219

Editorial Reviews

Bonnie Costello’s Shifting Ground is an important intervention in debates about the literary use of landscape. Costello’s introduction provides a clear and clear-eyed negotiation of recent and current theories, and seeks to challenge what she calls ‘the dominant argument in the humanities over the past forty years,’ that ‘landscape is an exhausted, even an insidious genre.’ The chapters that follow are devoted to the work of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Amy Clampitt, A. R. Ammons, and John Ashbery, and mix exposition and argument in dense and productive analyses.

Year’s Work in English Studies

A study that is...remarkable... for its detailed knowledge, lucidity of thought, and, quite often, for the sheer skill with which its author develops ingenious arguments and interpretations. Costello draws considerably on Bishop’s unpublished writings: her letters, journals, and manuscripts. These have been used occasionally before by other critics. But nobody has exploited the rich mine of material available in this unpublished work with the persistence, the sheer consistency of purpose and discovery, that Costello shows throughout... This is a book that adds significantly to our appreciation of a poet in whose work truth slips in. as it were, through the cold particularities of perception and then slips quietly away again.

Modern Language Review - Richard Gray

A critic who has written about Bishop before, [Costello] does a wonderful and surprisingly intimate job arguing that Bishop is one in a line of poets, and other artists, who use their chosen media to negotiate the tension between a generally unsympathetic, recalcitrant world and their tumultuous inner lives.

Times Literary Supplement - Robyn Selman

Bonnie Costello’s Shifting Ground is an important intervention in debates about the literary use of landscape. Costello’s introduction provides a clear and clear-eyed negotiation of recent and current theories, and seeks to challenge what she calls ‘the dominant argument in the humanities over the past forty years,’ that ‘landscape is an exhausted, even an insidious genre.’ The chapters that follow are devoted to the work of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Amy Clampitt, A. R. Ammons, and John Ashbery, and mix exposition and argument in dense and productive analyses.

Year’s Work in English Studies

Bonnie Costello's Shifting Ground is an important intervention in debates about the literary use of landscape. Costello's introduction provides a clear and clear-eyed negotiation of recent and current theories, and seeks to challenge what she calls "the dominant argument in the humanities over the past forty years," that "landscape is an exhausted, even an insidious genre." The chapters that follow are devoted to the work of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Amy Clampitt, A.R. Ammons, and John Ashbery, and mix exposition and argument in dense and productive analyses.

Year's Work in English Studies