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The Plural of Us is the first book to focus on the poet’s use of the first-person plural voice—poetry’s “we.” Closely exploring the work of W. H. Auden, Bonnie Costello uncovers the trove of thought and feeling carried in this small word. While lyric has long been associated with inwardness and a voice saying “I,” “we” has hardly been noticed, even though it has appeared throughout the history of poetry. Reading for this pronoun in its variety and ambiguity, Costello explores the communal function of poetry—the reasons, risks, and rewards of the first-person plural. Costello adopts a taxonomic approach to her subject, considering “we” from its most constricted to its ...
The poet Elizabeth Bishop is said to have a prismatic way of seeing. In this companion to her poetry, making connections between modern art and modern poetry, Bonnie Costello aims to give a sense of the poet and her ways of seeing and writing.
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.
Wallace Stevens is a major American poet and a central figure in modernist studies and twentieth-century poetry. This Companion introduces students to his work. An international team of distinguished contributors presents a unified picture of Stevens' poetic achievement. The Introduction explains why Stevens is among the world's great poets and offers specific guidance on how to read and appreciate his poetry. A brief biographical sketch anchors Stevens in the real world and illuminates important personal and intellectual influences. The essays following chart Stevens' poetic career and his affinities with both earlier and contemporary writers, artists, and philosophers. Other essays introduce students to the peculiarity and distinctiveness of Stevens' voice and style. They explain prominent themes in his work and explore the nuances of his aesthetic theory. With a detailed chronology and a guide to further reading, this Companion provides all the information a student or scholar of Stevens will need.
Analyzes the stages in Moore's development from purely imagist style to her preoccupations with the visual arts, with the question of form in relation to message and with the conflict between tension and fluency. Contains readings of individual poems, shedding light on their meaning and tone, under such headings as "Images of Sweetened Combat" and "Images of Luminosity, Iridescence, and Metamorphosis".
Just as the look of the American landscape has changed since the 19th century, so has our idea of landscape, with a contemplation of wild nature giving way to an understanding of Nature as a human construction. Here Bonnie Costello reads six 20th-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. Showing how these poets' landscapes respond to the sense of constant change, and to the disruption and acceleration of life characteristic of modern experience, Costello's work reveals the special role of poetry in teaching us to dwell on shifting ground.
Essays by leading critics, poets, and scholars that explore the work of recent U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer prize winner Louise Glück
"In this first book-length study of Charles Wright's extensive body of work, Joe Moffett offers an introduction to the books and themes that have defined the poet's illustrious career." "Wright's major work centers around a lengthy self-described "trilogy of trilogies" project in which each volume is a collection of poems stemming from a different trio of books. In his study of each segment of the trilogy, Moffett finds Wright returning to the distinctive landscape and culture of his native Appalachia in poetic quests for spiritual meaning. Moffett concludes with a survey of Wright's three subsequent volumes of poetry as a continuation of the poetic style and dialogue between southern landscapes and divine influences that defined the poet's earlier trilogies."--BOOK JACKET.
In Regions of Unlikeness Thomas Gardner explores the ways a number of quite different twentieth-century American poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Robert Hass, Jorie Graham, and Michael Palmer, frame their work as taking place within, and being brought to life by, an acknowledgment of the limits of language. Gardner approaches their poetry in light of philosopher Stanley Cavell?s remarkably similar engagement with the issues of skepticism and linguistic finitude. The skeptic?s refusal to settle for anything less than perfect knowledge of the world, Cavell maintains, amounts to a refusal to accept the fact of human finitude. Gardner argues that both Cavell and the poets he disc...
Catalog of an exhibition held at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, N.Y., Oct. 28, 2011-Jan. 29, 2012; Dallas Museum of Art, Mar. 4-May 27, 2012; Cleveland Museum of Art, July 1-Sept. 16, 2012.