Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Trousdale
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
Lucille Clifton ◽  
Sterling Brown ◽  
Shared Humanity ◽  
Competing Models ◽  
American Poets

Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry argues that American poets of the last hundred years use laughter to promote recognition of shared humanity across difference. Freud and Bergson argue that laughter patrols the boundary between in-group and out-group, but laughter can also help us cross or re-draw that boundary, creating a more democratic understanding of shared experience. Poets’ uses of humor reveal and reinforce deep-seated beliefs about the possibility of empathic mutual understanding among unlike interlocutors. These beliefs also shape poets’ senses of audience and their attitudes toward the notion that poets are somehow exceptional. When poets use humor to promote empathy, they make a claim about the basic ethical function of poetry, because humor and poetry share fundamental structures: both combine disparate subjects into newly meaningful wholes. Taking W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore on one side and Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot on the other as competing models of how humor can embrace, exclude, and transform, the book charts a developing poetics of laughter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the work of Sterling Brown, Elizabeth Bishop, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, and Lucille Clifton, among others. Poets whose race, gender, sexual orientation, or experimentalism place them outside the American mainstream are especially interested in humor’s potential to transcend the very differences it demarcates. Such writers increasingly replace mockery, satire, and other humorous attacks with comic forms that heighten readers’ understanding of and empathy with individuals, while revealing the failures of dominant hierarchical moral and logical systems.

The First Book

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Zuba
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
John Ashbery ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
The Past ◽  
Louise Gluck

“We have many poets of the First Book,” the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but also had come to define it. Surveying American poetry over the past hundred years, this book explores the emergence of the poetic debut as a unique literary production with its own tradition, conventions, and dynamic role in the literary market. Through new readings of ranging from Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore to John Ashbery and Louise Glück, the book illuminates the importance of the first book in twentieth-century American literary culture, which involved complex struggles for legitimacy on the part of poets, critics, and publishers alike. The book investigates poets' diverse responses to the question of how to launch a career in an increasingly professionalized literary scene that threatened the authenticity of the poetic calling. It shows how modernist debuts evoke markedly idiosyncratic paths, while postwar first books evoke trajectories that balance professional imperatives with traditional literary ideals. Debut titles ranging from Simpson's The Arrivistes to Ken Chen's Juvenilia stress the strikingly pervasive theme of beginning, accommodating a new demand for career development even as it distances the poets from that demand. Combining literary analysis with cultural history, this book will interest scholars and students of twentieth-century literature as well as readers and writers of poetry.

Dylan Thomas and American Poetry: ‘a kind of secret, but powerful, leaven’

2019 ◽  
pp. 197-214
Author(s):  
Philip Coleman
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
Broad View ◽  
John Berryman ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dylan Thomas ◽  
American Poets ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Way

In The Poetry of Dylan Thomas (2013), John Goodby argues that ‘[t]he scope of Thomas’s impact on US poetry is remarkable, and it testifies to his characteristic hybrid ambivalence’. In the spirit of elaborating on this observation, this chapter considers how a number of quite different American poets have engaged with Thomas’s work, including Charles Olson, Delmore Schwartz, Elizabeth Bishop, and Denise Levertov. The essay also brings into focus the more explicit dialogue established throughout the poetry of John Berryman, for whom Thomas was a constant and almost familial figure from the 1940s to the end of his career. In Dream Song 88, Berryman imagines Thomas in the afterlife ‘with more to say / now there’s no hurry, and we’re all a clan.’ In this chapter, the idea of American poets belonging to or seeking to belong to such a ‘clan’ is examined, up to and including the work of a number of contemporary poets and schools of verse. The chapter takes a broad view, then, of the many ways Thomas has influenced the writing of poetry, and in doing so scrutinises the way the history of American poetry has so often been narrated.

Marianne Moore’s “Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns”: The “Unreal realities” of Early Modern Maps and Animals

2003 ◽  
pp. 28-64
Author(s):  
Adele J. Haft
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
Art And Science ◽  
Sea Lions ◽  
Age Of Exploration ◽  
American Poets

This paper is about a poet and two cartographers. The poet is Marianne Moore, one of the most lauded and loved American poets of the twentieth century. In 1924 she published “Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns,” a poem examining four exotic beasts—narwhals, unicorns, sea lions, lions—and their celebrated, if unreal, relationships to one another. While describing sea unicorns early in the poem, Moore specifies “the cartographers of 1539.” The date can only allude to the Carta Marina of the Swedish mapmaker and historian Olaus Magnus, whose famous 1539 “marine map” features a profusion of Scandinavian land and sea creatures. Moore’s “cartographers of 1539” compels us, in turn, to consider other mapmakers who crowded their maps with animals. The plural phrase also balances and anticipates her comparison, near the end of the poem, of the unicorn and “an equine monster of an old celestial map.” Though vague, the simile may suggest the winged figure of Pegasus on a celestial chart by Peter Apian. This popular German cartographer and astronomer originally designed his chart in 1536, then reproduced it—a year after the Carta Marina—in his exquisite Astronomicum Caesareum (1540). In the end, Moore’s portrayal of animals in “Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns” captures the spirit that animated mapping, art, and science during the sixteenth-century Age of Exploration.

Avant-Folk: Small Press Poetry Networks from 1950 to the Present

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross Hair
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Small Press ◽  
Lorine Niedecker ◽  
American Poets ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Comprehensive Study

Avant-Folk is the first comprehensive study of a loose collective of important British and American poets, publishers, and artists (including Lorine Niedecker, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Jonathan Williams) and the intersection of folk and modernist, concrete and lyric poetics within the small press poetry networks that developed around these figures from the 1950s up to the present day. This book argues that the merging of the demotic with the avant-garde is but one of the many consequences of a particularly vibrant period of creative exchange when this network of poets, publishers, and artists expanded considerably the possibilities of small press publishing. Avant-Folk explores how, from this still largely unexplored body of work, emerge new critical relations to place, space, and locale. Paying close attention to the transmission of demotic cultural expressions, this study of small press poetry networks also revises current assessments regarding the relationship between the cosmopolitan and the regional and between avant-garde and vernacular, folk aesthetics. Readers of Avant-Folk will gain an understanding of how small press publishing practices have revised these familiar terms and how they reconceive the broader field of twentieth-century British and American poetry.

He Became His Admirers

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aidan Wasley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Broad Spectrum ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Derek Walcott ◽  
American Poets ◽  
The Moment ◽  
James Schuyler

Auden's death on September 29, 1973 prompted an enormous range of poetic responses from younger American poets, many of them following Auden's example as Auden had followed Yeats, both in using the poet's own language in their memorials for him and in turning the moment, and their readings of the meaning of Auden's life and work, toward their own individual artistic arguments and purposes. Indeed, no twentieth-century poet has spawned as many elegies, eulogies, and remembrances from as wide a range of practicing poets as Auden. This chapter surveys a few of these poetic farewells to Auden, from across a broad spectrum of American verse, which provide a compelling testimonial to, and concluding perspective on, his impact on an entire generation—and beyond—of American poetry. These include the work of James Schuyler, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Louis Simpson, Irving Feldman, and Derek Walcott.

Dark Energy in Robert Frost’s Poems

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (7) ◽  
pp. 1372
Author(s):  
Yujie Su
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Dark Energy ◽  
New England ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Grief And Loss ◽  
Robert Frost ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
American Poets ◽  
Human And Nature

Robert Frost is regarded as one of the most distinguished American poets in the twentieth century. His work usually realistically describes the rural life in New England in the early twentieth century and conveys complex social and philosophical themes. But his personal life was plagued with grief and loss, which is also reflected in his poems, and the dark energy distinguishes Robert Frost’s poems, frequently conveyed in the use of lexical words like dark and its derivatives or synonyms, woods, snow, night, and so on. The present study starts with the survey of the lexical representations of dark energy used in Robert Frost’s poems, which are collected in The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and the other poems listed on the website which are not collected in the book but written by Robert Frost[1], aiming to gain more understanding of the great poet’s contemplation involving human and nature.

‘Out Past / Self-Dramatization’: Maurice Scully's Several Dances

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-118
Author(s):  
Romana Huk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
American Poets

What has lyric to do with any radical phenomenology's choreography? Maurice Scully in Several Dances asks that question, as he has for years now, alongside other poets of Ireland's avant-garde whose ‘distinguishing (not inhibiting) feature’, as Sarah Bennett writes (acknowledging the work of Alex Davis and Eric Falci before her) is that in it ‘the lyric subject persists’ – in tandem with, this essay argues, what she names ‘an interest in perception … [which] is perhaps the most compelling commonality in these poets' work’. What distinguishes Scully's from the lyric phenomenology of American poets from William Carlos Williams (invoked throughout the volume) to George Oppen (also invoked) is that he queries existentialism's ‘singular’ approach to phenomena, achieved as Heidegger thought through the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ of individual (and communal) preconceptions from the perception of things. Cosmic – even theological – speculation enters in as Scully's poems move out past both self-centered lyric and twentieth-century cancellations of all preconceptions in the ‘limit-thinking’ and being-toward-death that phenomenology proposed for seeing past the self. Yet Scully works with mortality always in his sights too as he sings ‘the Huuuman / Limit-at-tation Blues’ (p.118) and, more vertiginously, considers both the undelimitability and the fragility of us.

Lucille Clifton: Defining What American Poetry Is

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 541-543
Author(s):  
Cheryl A Wall
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
Lucille Clifton

Americanization and Beika

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuko Matsumoto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
World War ◽  
Full Membership ◽  
Japanese Immigrants ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Gendered Stereotypes ◽  
The U.S

The Americanization movement in the early twentieth century tried to redefine the qualifications for full membership within the nation. In the same period, the anti-Asian movement flourished. Responding actively to the discourses of anti-Japanese (and Asian) movements, Japanese immigrants tried to prove their eligibility for full membership in the U.S. nation by following their own interpretation of Americanization, or Beika (米化‎) in Japanese. The ideas of Beika were based on idealized Japanese virtues, as well as on what was required by the Americanization movement. Even though they used the parallel terms in ideas of Beika, however, the gender discourses such as virtues of Yamatonadeshiko and the definition of family highlighted the difference between the views of Americanization and those of Beika despite their similar intention. This gap in perception might have reinforced the racialized and gendered stereotypes on both sides and hindered mutual understanding before World War II.

1. American poetry’s two characteristics

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
David Caplan
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
The Other ◽  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
Anne Bradstreet ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

“American poetry’s two characteristics” explains the two characteristics which mark American poetry. On the one hand, several of its major figures promoted American poetry as essentially different from any other nation’s. Although the reasons they offer vary, they typically claim that American experience demands a different kind of expression. Such poets advocate for novelty, for a break with what is perceived to be outmoded and foreign. On the other hand, American poetry might be more rightly called profoundly transnational. American poetry often welcomes techniques, styles, and traditions originating from outside it. The two characteristics do not exist separately from each other. Rather, they work in a productive dialectic, inspiring both individual accomplishment and the broader field. Examples include Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and Langston Hughes.

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