Twentieth Century American Poetry

The paper is concerned with the representation of trauma and redemption in two long poems by Galway Kinnell: " The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World " and " When the Towers Fell. " Each poem in its own way carries echoes of Whitmanian celebration and Eliotesque lament, as they address critical traumas of the western world. The two poems chronicle New York City in very different moments: " Avenue C " is published fifteen years after the Holocaust, whereas " When the Towers Fell is published just one year after the attacks on 9/11). This gives the latter poem an immediacy that the former does not demand. Both poems carry little redemption, or a redemption that is immediately undermined again. However, while each poem registers the spiritual deterioration of survivors and bystanders of the traumas, they both indirectly affirm belief in perseverance, and in maintaining the power of words to record, register, or simply speak of existence.

Recent scholars have noted the anti-consolatory trend in modern elegy, and remarked on the ways in which twentieth-century elegies revolt against the convention of compensatory consolation in their expression of disconsolation. Using Wallace Stevens's "The Owl in the Sarcophagus" as a test case, this essay proposes a rethinking of our notion of elegiac consolation: instead of reading this allegorical, equivocating poem as an anti-elegy, this article argues, with the aid of D. W. Winnicott's object-relation theory, that the poem's consolation is based less on the mechanism of compensation than on the cryptonymic process of placing an unplaced feeling of loss.

Lems (United States) " In my position teaching at a large urban university in Chicago, I work with adult immigrants between 18 and 65 years of age. As working adults, they have a pragmatic attitude toward their studies. There are few if any motivation problems, and they do nearly any amount of homework I assign. Upon completion of their ESL classes, some of them leave the university and others continue with university studies. Of those who stay in the university, most study business or computers. " After advising some students who were exiting our program about their future courses, I realized that many of them would go immediately into their specialization coursework, perhaps taking only one required composition course, and thus never encountering any literature in their studies. Colleges in the United States assume students beginning undergraduate studies have had exposure to American literature in secondary school, but this is not the case with immigrant students. As a result, I decided to create an opportunity for my students to encounter English language literature before they finished their English classes. To do this, I put together a poetry unit, featuring one American poem each week. I invited a colleague teaching at the same level to do the unit on poems in tandem with me during our ten-week quarter. The purpose of this article is to present some preliminary results of the poetry unit after teaching it for two quarters. Preparation Over a holiday break, I sat down with 20 literary anthologies and started picking out poems. I decided to confine my choices to American poetry because my students are immigrants to the U.S., and I wanted them to get a sense of American literature. Furthermore, some students seemed to labor under the mistaken belief that the only "real" literature in English emanates from England. After many hours of reading, I put together a list of 18 poems that had a moderate vocabulary load, compelling topics, and reasonable length. I gave my students copies of the poems on the first day of class. For the second quarter, I cut the original list of poems to 16, which still left enough to work with in a ten-week term. In setting up the project, the other teacher and I wanted to try several different ways of integrating the poetry into the rest of the curriculum. First, we each taught one poem once a week, for about 30 minutes, through direct instruction, and supplemented it with related materials, such as songs. The students made notations on their handouts and enjoyed the line-by-line analysis, jotting down many new vocabulary words along the way. Second, we invited students to write about the poems in their journals. This was to give students an opportunity for a more thoughtful, personal response to the poems than the classroom setting permitted. Finally, both of us assigned one of the poems as a composition topic.

Around the time she started composing the poems that were to appear in Ariel, her second volume of poetry that later earned her posthumous fame, Sylvia Plath had come to see herself as “a political person as well,” a poet who was increasingly absorbed by history and its larger relevance to contemporary individual existence. In many of her poems written in 1962-1963, the idea of institutional oppression and the sheepish – or even mechanical – servility it generates come to the forefront, while the speakers of the poems ponder the possibility of individual freedom within the bounds of an ethical humanity. In the poems, people are presented, to some extent, as exploited and tortured by the repressive codes of the community even though they seem unaware of being oppressed. At the same time, they are also held responsible for the perpetuation of injustice and abuse. This paper examines the organising thematic motifs of oppression and revolt as well as the liberating poetic techniques Plath developed for her Ariel poems that make such a revision of values possible in such late poems as “Burning the Letters,” “The Swarm,” “Totem” and “Kindness.”

After the Whitmanian revolution in American poetics, rhyme in English language poetry was not fully redeemed until a generation later in the work of Robert Frost. He was born in 1874, when the Civil War had been over for less than a decade, Whitman and Emerson were old but very much alive, and most of the country still lacked electricity. The “great transformation” of the lifeworld—from subsistence farming and handicrafts into coal-powered assembly lines—was just beginning. Frost’s poems are concrete and can be read literally, with a minimum of interpretation; yet they are highly suggestive of deeper issues which require metaphorical reading. This is a factor in his remarkable popularity, since naïve as well as sophisticated readers find gratification in them. Frost’s poems of work can be sorted into those which celebrate and even glorify pre-industrial manual labor (mowing with a scythe, picking apples on a ladder, chopping wood with an axe, building haystacks with a pitchfork, hoeing, and so on), and those which confront and lament the brutal power of industrial machines, large or small (e.g., the power saw, the mill, and the newly ubiquitous telephone pole he called “a barkless specter”). His deep ambivalence over modern technology and its social results did not constitute a thorough rejection of the times, nor an uncritical nostalgia for a vanishing past. Frost’s critique bears on the way new technologies and their wealthy beneficiaries had begun to intrude into what might have remained (and to a small degree, has remained) a traditional society of self-reliance, cautious but genuine fellowship, and respect for the sublimity of Nature.

In 1962, the Heritage Series of Black Poetry, founded and edited by Paul Breman, published Robert Hayden's A Ballad of Remembrance. By 1975, the Series had published 27 volumes by some of the 20th century's most important and influential poets. As elaborated in Lauri Ramey's extensive scholarly introduction, this innovative volume has dual purposes: To provide primary sources that recover the history and legacy of this groundbreaking venture, and to serve as a research companion for scholars working on the Series and on twentieth century African American and African diasporic poetry. Never-before-published materials include Paul Breman's memoir, retrospectives and poems by poets published in the Series, scholarly essays, bibliographical and biographical information, and a photo-documentary of W.E.B. Du Bois's 1958 visit to the Netherlands.

This paper situates the work of the Irish modernist Denis Devlin and the mid-century American poet Robert Lowell within a transatlantic literary network that was profoundly shaped by the New Critics, and eliciting comparable aspects of their poetry in the forties in terms of a New Critical aesthetic.

This handbook answers the need for fresh and informative readings of canonical and non-canonical poems. The thirty-one chapters engage revisionary trends in poetry scholarship. They unfold a critical history of American poetry that challenges conventional interpretations and provide insightful new readings of well-known poems and writers as well as introductions to poets and texts that may be more unfamiliar. Each chapter focuses on two poets set into dialogue with each other, presenting paired readings of one representative text from each author. In addition to a number of familiar texts and names that are necessary for students to understand basic developments in American poetry, the handbook offers chapters on multilingual colonial poetry, nineteenth-century Native American poetry, and contemporary experimental poetry.
The paired readings of poems in each chapter also invite interconnected lessons that make readers compare, for example, the communal conventions of colonial poetry to the collective poetics of contemporary performance poetry. The handbook encourages readings across and against literary periods, while annotated paired readings and additional reading suggestions should inspire students to analyze poems as particular sites of historical and political meaning. Being both a manual in terms of current theoretical directions in literary studies and a guide to practical criticism, A History of American Poetry helps students to further explore the diversity and multiple poetic traditions that make up American poetry in its intersections with historical contexts and other literatures.

This paper joins the revivalist bandwagon by offering yet another reading of Sandburg’s poetry via the concept of grotesque. I argue that the grotesque in Sandburg’s poetry tends to undermine the elitist principles of American modern poetry. Admittedly, Sandburg’s work falls short of the dominant, formalist standards in the tradition of New Criticism. But a close examination of aspects that considerably fall within the grotesque genre could open a renewed appreciation for his poetry.

One of the most monumental poetic works of T.S Eliot is ‘The Waste Land’. The poem emerges as a gigantic metaphor for melancholy, loneliness, solitude- the unavoidable companions of human existence. Similar kinds of feelings are evoked by Robert Frost in ‘Desert Places’.

The very title is suggestive of a mood of emptiness. Throughout our life we cross various deserts to find our destiny. The beauty of the poem lies in the conjunction – the meeting point desert outside in the nature with the desert inside. This becomes the focal point of the poem. The dreary opening is indicated by the falling snow and the advancing night. The poet observes the scenario as the snow blankets the earth and the darkness descends on the whole scene. Two factors which play an important role in the dawning of the mood are snow and night.

The young T. S. Eliot spent a year as a student in Paris, in 1910-1911. Why did he come there? What experiences did he have during that year? The paper focuses on Eliot's fascination for French poetry, his attending Bergson's lessons at the Collège de France and the lasting impact those lessons had on his poetry, and his encounter with the Action française.

Adrienne Rich is one of the most famous American feminist poets in the modern world. She stated
that women are gendered in the patriarchal society to be inferiors, victims and weak. In Rich’s
poem, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, she proposes that re-gendering discourse will help women
to prove their own female identities away from the patriarchal heterosexual discourse which
oppressed women along history. This article focuses on Adrienne Rich’s poem in the light of her
feminist discourse of re-gendering, through tracing the semiotic elements within the symbolic
patriarchal language. This is done by applying Kristeva’s concept of the Semiotic and the Symbolic
to be the framework of the study. Kristeva states that the semiotic is maternal and the symbolic is
masculine, and both of these modalities are needed in the signifying process. Therefore, Rich
regains to language the feminine principle which is the only way to create an unprejudiced
language that is fair to the masculine and feminine needs

An analysis of "These," one of Williams' greatest and most enigmatic poems.  Places it in the tradition of other poems about melancholy, including lyrics by Milton and Keats, and related works, including Dürer's etching Melencolia.  Originally published in _The William Carlos Williams Review_, 1983.

The monograph (in Slovak and with an extensive resumé in English) Haugová's Plath, Plath's Haugová. On Slovak Translations of Sylvia Plath's Poetry analyses the Slovak translation of Plath’s poetry undertaken by the Slovak poet and translator Mila Haugová and published in 1989 under the title Luna a tis [The Moon and the Yew Tree]. Chapters of the book discuss the translation from various viewpoints and aim at capturing the translator’s approach in its complexity. They touch upon and interpret translator’s choice of poems for translation, the ways she renders the formal attributes of the poems and individual shifts of meaning and motifs that can be found in the translated poems. The current critical companion also looks at the complex of problems from the opposite direction – it aims at describing and explaining the affinities and differences between the two original authorial voices (especially in connection with the image of the female body and its functions in the text) as well as at understanding the impact the act of translating had on Slovak poet’s original writing. The author of the book adopts tools of corpus-based translation studies and context-based interpretation to do so. The final chapter of the work compares multiple Slovak and Czech translations of several Plath’s poems (except for Mily Haugová, these were undertaken by Slovak translators and poets Ján Buzássy and Milan Richter and Czech Jan Zábrana). The monograph also outlines the current situation in Slovak literary translation studies and uncovers links, ruptures and contradictions in the translated texts, adopting the discourse of translation criticism, but also a more notional translation studies discourse.

V prítomnej monografii sa autorka primárne zameriava na analýzu prekladu básní Sylvie Plathovej, ktorého autorkou je Mila Haugová a ktorý bol publikovaný vo výbere Luna a tis (1989). Jednotlivé kapitoly práce sa z rôznych uhlov pozerajú na prekladové dielo a na základe čiastkových interpretácií sa sústreďujú na postihnutie prekladateľkinej koncepcie. Všímajú si najmä otázku výberu textov na preklad, spôsob tlmočenia tvarovej stránky básne a individuálne posuny vo významoch a motívoch a dosah týchto operácií na identitu a interpretáciu výsledného textu. Haugovej Plathová, Plathovej Haugová sa však na problém pozerá aj z druhej strany – postihuje príbuznosti a rozdiely autorských poetík americkej a slovenskej poetky (najmä vo vzťahu k motívu ženského tela a jeho funkcií v texte) a snaží sa o vyhmatnutie pôsobenia Haugovej prekladateľskej aktivity na jej pôvodnú tvorbu, siahajúc po nástrojoch korpusovej translatológie v kombinácii s kontextom poučenou interpretáciou. V závere sa autorka zameriava na komparáciu dostupných slovenských prekladov jednotlivých Plathovej básní (okrem prekladov Mily Haugovej i na preklady Jána Buzássyho a Milana Richtera) a porovnáva ich aj s českým prekladom, ktorého autorom je Jan Zábrana. Súčasťou práce je aj ponor do súčasnej situácie v slovenskej translatológii literárneho textu. Práca interpretačne poodhaľuje súvislosti, ruptúry a protirečenia v textoch prekladu, miestami diskurzom prekladovej kritiky, inokedy nocionálnejším diskurzom translatológie umeleckého textu.