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Steven Gould Axelrod, Camille Roman, and Thomas Travisano continue the standard of excellence set in Volumes I and II of this extraordinary anthology. Volume III provides the most compelling and wide-ranging selection available of American poetry from 1950 to the present. Its contents are just as diverse and multifaceted as America itself and invite readers to explore the world of poetry in the larger historical context of American culture. Nearly three hundred poems allow readers to explore canonical works by such poets as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath, as well as song lyrics from such popular musicians as Bob Dylan and Queen Latifah. Because contemporary American culture transcends the borders of the continental United States, the anthology also includes numerous transnational poets, from Julia de Burgos to Derek Walcott. Whether they are the works of oblique avant-gardists like John Ashbery or direct, populist poets like Allen Ginsberg, all of the selections are accompanied by extensive introductions and footnotes, making the great poetry of the period fully accessible to readers for the first time.
Sylvia Plath is widely recognized as one of the leading figures in twentieth-century Anglo-American literature and culture. Her work has constantly remained in print in the UK and US (and in numerous translated editions) since the appearance of her first collection in 1960. Plath's own writing has been supplemented over the decades by a wealth of critical and biographical material. The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath provides an authoritative and comprehensive guide to the poetry, prose and autobiographical writings of Sylvia Plath. It offers a critical overview of key readings, debates and issues from almost fifty years of Plath scholarship, draws attention to the historical, literary, national and gender contexts which frame her writing and presents informed and attentive readings of her own work. This accessibly written book will be of great use to students beginning their explorations of this important writer.
This major interpretation of the life and art of Robert Lowell exposes the full relationship between the poetry and the personal and national experience to which it is so remarkably connected. Steven Axelrod proposes that the key to our understanding of Lowell's poetic achievement lies precisely in this interpenetration of his life and his art. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Robert Lowell is one of the most widely recognised and influential poets of the second half of this century. Yet his career is problematical and raises many questions about direction and quality, particularly in light of his repeated reorientation of thematic concern and poetic technique. Many previous studies of the poet have accounted for these radical differences in Lowell's work by examining the poet's private life, but this collection of essays attempts to reassess Lowell's poetry and to restimulate critical thinking about it by focusing on his texts to raise new questions and discussions about the work. The twelve essays in this volume, by many of the most distinguished scholars in the field, offer a chronological review of Robert Lowell's career as a poet. The book includes pieces on major works such as Lord Weary's Castle, Life Studies, For the Union Dead, 'Skunk Hour', Notebook, the sonnets of 1969-73 as well as four essays devoted to Lowell's last complete and often neglected work, Day by Day. Employing a variety of methodologies, the essays arrive at innovative and, often, controversial interpretations of Lowell's poems.
A complete collection of Robert Lowell’s autobiographical prose, from unpublished writings about his youth to reflections on the triumphs and confusions of his adult life. Robert Lowell’s Memoirs is an unprecedented literary discovery: the manuscript of Lowell’s lyrical evocation of his childhood, which was written in the 1950s and has remained unpublished until now. Meticulously edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, it serves as a precursor or companion to his groundbreaking book of poems Life Studies, which signaled a radically new prose-inflected direction in his work, and indeed in American poetry. Memoirs also includes intense depictions of Lowell’s mental illness and his determined efforts to recover. It concludes with Lowell’s reminiscences of other writers, among them T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Hannah Arendt, and Sylvia Plath. Memoirs demonstrates Lowell’s expansive gifts as a prose stylist and his powers of introspection and observation. It provides striking new evidence of the range and brilliance of Lowell’s achievement. Includes black-and-white photographs
New essays providing fresh insights into the great 20th-century American poet Lowell, his writings, and his struggles.
Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co.: Middle-Generation Poets in Context Takes on the oft-noted but little explored friendship of three of the most respected poets of the twentieth century. Editor Suzanne Ferguson collects eighteen essays that explore the literary, personal, and political affiliations of Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell, influential literary figures who flourished in the periods between modernism and postmodernism. Essay in the first section of the book directly compare the subjects, while sections on each of the poets follow. The contributors unpack received wisdom on the poets, revising and updating our conceptions. The multiple viewpoints reflect on one anot...
Ten original essays by advanced scholars and well-published poets address the middle generation of American poets, including the familiar---Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman---and various important contemporaries: Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hayden, and Lorine Niedecker. This was a famously troubled cohort of writers, for reasons both personal and cultural, and collectively their poems give us powerful, moving insights into American social life in the transforming decades of the 1940s through the 1960s.In addition to having worked during the broad middle of the last century, these poets constitute the center of twentieth-century American poetr...