Politics and form in postmodern poetry : O'Hara, Bishop, Ashbery, and Merrill
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Bibliographic Information
Politics and form in postmodern poetry : O'Hara, Bishop, Ashbery, and Merrill
（Cambridge studies in American literature and culture）
Cambridge University Press, 2009, c1995
- : pbk
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"First published 1995. This digitally printed version 2009"--T.p. verso
"Paperback re-issue"--Back cover
Includes bibliographical references (p. 208-214) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Approaching post-World War II poetry from a postmodern critical perspective, this study challenges the prevailing assumption that experimental forms signify political opposition while traditional forms are politically conservative. Such essentialist alignments of forms with extra-formal values, and the oppositional framework of innovation versus conservation that they yield, reflect modernist biases inappropriate for reading postwar poetry. Biasing defines postmodern poetry as a break with modernism's valorization of technique and its implicit collusion with technological progress. She shows that four major postwar poets - Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and James Merrill (two traditional and two experimental) - cannot be read as politically conservative because formally traditional or as culturally oppositional because formally experimental. All of these poets acknowledge that no one form is more natural than another, and no given form grants them a superior position for judging cultural and political arrangements. Their work plays an important cultural role precisely by revealing that meanings and values do not inhere in forms but are always and irreducibly rhetorical.
Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction: poetry after Modernism
- 2. Frank O'Hara: 'How Am I to Become a Legend?'
- 3. Elizabeth Bishop: 'Repeat, Repeat, Repeat
- Revise, Revise, Revise'
- 4. John Ashbery: 'The Epidemic of the Way We Live Now'
- 5. James Merrill: 'Sour Windfalls of the Orchard Back of Us'.
by "Nielsen BookData"