American experimental poetry and democratic thought / Alan Marshall.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Marshall, Alan, Dr.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Experimental poetry, American--19th century--History and criticism.

Experimental poetry, American.

Experimental poetry, American--20th century--History and criticism.

Democracy in literature.

Physical Description:

xi, 315. pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, [2009]

Summary:

Alan Marshall takes Alexis de Tocqueville's discussion of ‘Some Sources of Poetic Inspiration in Democracies’ in the second volume of his Democracy in America as the starting point for a wide-ranging examination of the nature of democratic thought and expression in American experimental poetry, from Walt Whitman and, Emily Dickinson in the mid-nineteenth century, to George Oppen, Frank O'Hara, and Robert Creeley a century later. The book begins by considering the political significance of what Marshall describes as 'the invisible physiognomy' of Whitman's poetry, which is followed by a re-evaluation of the flawed republican humanism of Ezra Pound in the light of the thought of Hannah Arendt. Other chapters deal with Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Muriel Rukeyser.

The book argues against the narrowly ideological interpretation of politics that dominates contemporary literary studies. To that extent it recalls Tocqueville's concern to underline the differences between his own methods and perspectives and the historical determinism of his contemporaries. Marshall brings together an exceptional variety of theoretical writing, including works by Theodor Adorno, Seyla Benhabib, Stanley Cavell, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, James Madison, Karl Marx, David Riesman, and Donald Winnicott, as he seeks to expand and develop Tocqueville's circumspect humanist critical trajectory. The chapters are conceived as a series of innovative dialogical constellations, to which the close reading of poetry is central. The aim throughout is to measure the thought of the poets or their poems against the thoughts of those who are more often called thinkers.

Contents:

1 The Flag of His Disposition: Whitman's Posture 14

1.1 'On Some Sources of Poetic Inspiration in Democracies' 16

1.2 Freud and Narcissism 26

1.3 'Beneath Thy Look O Maternal' 34

1.4 Whitman and Winnicott 38

1.5 'A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim', 'The Wound-Dresser', Calamus 42

1.6 'Is This Then a Touch?' 50

2 The Poet in the Dark: Ezra Pound, an Arendtian Perspective 55

2.1 Subjects and Objects 59

2.2 Actions: Aristotle, Marx, Marxists, Arendt 71

2.3 Revolutions and Recognitions 83

2.4 Craft or Consensus? 87

3 I am alive-because | I do not own a House' / Emily Dickinson, Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker 92

3.1 The Philosopher's House: From Arendt to Cavell 92

3.2 From Cavell to Dickinson 101

3.3 Four Facets of Unheimlichkeit: Freud, Heidegger, Adorno, Gilman 112

3.4 Mina Loy 119

3.5 Lorine Niedecker 136

4 Williams Stevens Williams...Continuing Revolution 146

4.1 Revolution 149

4.2 The Federalist Critique 151

4.3 In the American Grain 155

4.4 Use and Use-Value 162

4.5 Representations: From Madison to Kant 173

4.6 From Representation to Exchange-Relations 179

4.7 The Enigma of Form 185

4.8 'Life Is Not Dialectics' 190

5 Robert Creeley's Lonely Crowd 195

5.1 From Williams to Creeley 197

5.2 The New American Nervousness: Riesman and Heidegger 209

5.3 'Poem for D. H. Lawrence' 217

5.4 Language, Politics, Commonplaces 223

5.5 Diffidence 229

6 'Ferocious Mumbling in Public': George Oppen 233

6.1 Another Look at Oppen and Heidegger 233

6.2 'Poetry Defined as a Job, a Piece of Work' 246

6.3 'More than Politics Really' 258

6.4 'Of Being Numerous' 262

6.5 Fellow Travellers / Richard Wright, Muriel Rukeyser 270.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780199561926

0199561923

OCLC:

430497018