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Describes the life of the Yale University professor behind the deconstruction movement, who at the time of his death was one of the most influential literary critics in America but was later revealed to be a Nazi collaborator and anti-Semite.
In this deeply felt biography, Ashby Bland Crowder treats in near definitive fashion one of southern literature's unjustly neglected masters. In superb novels like Home from the Hill, The Ordways, and Proud Flesh as well as in the brilliant story collections The Last Husband and A Time and a Place, William Humphrey (1924--1997) created an imaginary East Texas Red River County, conjuring the speech and life rhythms of his native territory with artistic genius. Crowder's lyrical blending of biographical fact and incisive analysis corrects a mistaken view that Humphrey was among those writers mired in the pious cult of southern delusionary remembrance. From early short fiction set in a New York...
Twenty-eight contemporary American poets reflect on the poems that have most influenced their own creative vision and offer their best new works in this examination of poetic expression. Each entry includes a new poem from the author, the text of a poem or poems that particularly influenced the development of the new poem, and an essay about that influence. The dialogue created between the new works of the poets and the poems that they love provides insight into the poetic process and speaks to the meaning and endurance of great art.
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Although readers of prose fiction sometimes find descriptive passages superfluous or boring, description itself is often the most important aspect of a poem. This book examines how a variety of contemporary poets use description in their work. Description has been the great burden of poetry. How do poets see the world? How do they look at it? What do they look for? Is description an end in itself, or a means of expressing desire? Ezra Pound demanded that a poem should represent the external world as objectively and directly as possible, and William Butler Yeats, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), said that he and his generation were rebelling against, inter alia, ...
Lorine Niedecker (1903–70) was a poet of extraordinary talent whose life and work were long enveloped in obscurity. After her death in 1970, poet Basil Bunting wrote that she was “the most interesting woman poet America has yet produced . . . only beginning to be appreciated when she died.” Her poverty and arduous family life, the isolated home in Wisconsin that provided rich imagery for her work, and her unusual acquaintances have all contributed to Niedecker’s enigmatic reputation. Margot Peters brings Lorine Niedecker’s life out of the shadows in this first full biography of the poet. She depicts Niedecker’s watery world on Blackhawk Island (near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin), whe...
A Circular Journey collects for the first time in one book the essays that most powerfully define the unique gifts of one of America's most distinctive voices. These fifteen pieces, tracking some thirty years of a writer's life, come together to illuminate the stages and themes and places that mark Helen Barolini's art. Divided into three closely linked sections--"Home," "Abroad," "Return,"--the essays move through Barolini's worlds. Her love of literature began when, as a child growing up as an avid reader in Syracuse, New York, she was presented with a diary and told to write in it. Returning to the heritage of her Italian immigrant grandparents, she moved to Italy as a young writer. There...
A wide-ranging, first-of-its-kind selection of Berryman’s correspondence with friends, loved ones, writers, and editors, showcasing the turbulent, fascinating life and mind of one of America’s major poets. The Selected Letters of John Berryman assembles for the first time the poet’s voluminous correspondence. Beginning with a letter to his parents in 1925 and concluding with a letter sent a few weeks before his death in 1972, Berryman tells his story in his own words. Included are more than 600 letters to almost 200 people—editors, family members, students, colleagues, and friends. The exchanges reveal the scope of Berryman’s ambitions, as well as the challenges of practicing his a...
The Stamp of Class is about reading poetry with an awareness of class and its themes. While numerous works have taken up the question of race and gender as they relate to literary creation, no single book has probed the interplay between class and American poetry. The nine essays in Gary Lenhart's book deal with the question of class as reflected in the works of Tracie Morris, Tillie Olsen, Melvin Tolson, William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, and others. The work is rooted in the author's own experiences as a working-class poet and teacher, and is the result of more than a decade of exploration.