Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry
Peter Campion
Abstract
What do American poets mean when they talk about freedom? How can form help us understand questions about what shapes we want to give our poetic lives, and how much power do we have to choose those shapes? For that matter, what do we even mean by we? This collection of essays forms a kind of evolutionary history of the past century of American poetry. Through close readings of the great Modernists, midcentury objectivists, late twentieth-century poets, contemporary poets, and more, the book unearths an American poetic landscape that is subtler and more varied than most critics have allowed. It ... More
What do American poets mean when they talk about freedom? How can form help us understand questions about what shapes we want to give our poetic lives, and how much power do we have to choose those shapes? For that matter, what do we even mean by we? This collection of essays forms a kind of evolutionary history of the past century of American poetry. Through close readings of the great Modernists, midcentury objectivists, late twentieth-century poets, contemporary poets, and more, the book unearths an American poetic landscape that is subtler and more varied than most critics have allowed. It uncovers commonalities among poets considered opposites, dramatizes how form and history are mutually entailing, and explores how the conventions of poetry, its inheritance, and its inventions sprang from the tensions of ordinary life. At its core, the book is about poetic making, one that reveals how the best poets not only receive but understand and adapt what comes before them, reinterpreting the history of their art to create work that is, indeed, radical as reality.
Keywords:
American poetry,
Modernism,
freedom,
form,
democratic poetry,
war poetry,
sincerity,
African American poetry,
classicism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226663234 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: May 2020 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226663401.001.0001 |
