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.

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.

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.

‘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.

Realism and Poetry

2019 ◽  
pp. 485-505
Author(s):  
Jonathan N. Barron
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Robert Frost ◽  
Interior Space ◽  
New Science ◽  
The World ◽  
Poetic Realism ◽  
American Cities ◽  
Sara Teasdale ◽  
Pragmatic Philosophy

American poetic realism still remains a largely unknown and untold story. Although it came to American poetry relatively late by comparison with fiction, the typical American realist poem has a distinctive nexus combining theme, diction, and style. Chief among the first American realists are Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and Sara Teasdale. Specifically, realist poetry expresses a pragmatic philosophy rejecting the individual’s location in the world as something knowable, fixed, and stable. Realist poets reject as amoral and quietist the commitment to beauty for the sake of beauty and tend toward virtues associated with masculinity. Their poetry rejects generic nouns in favor of particulars and depicts recognizable contemporary landscapes and, above all, contemporary American cities such as Chicago, Boston, or New York. It emphasizes the interior space of the self as revealed by the new science of psychology. It also focuses on the living idiom of talk and speech rather than a “literary” language.

Eden in Sussex: Atheist Moderns and the Berwick Church Murals

2018 ◽  
pp. 239-254
Author(s):  
Hana Leaper ◽  
Polly Mills
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

After war broke out in 1939, Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant accepted a commission from Dr. George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, to design murals for Berwick church. This chapter discusses the realisation of these unique works within a framework of Bell and Grant’s Charleston House location, their pacifism and atheism, their adoption of rural life and decoration of Charleston. A major theme is exploration of the relationship between dissenting voices in the local Sussex community and the support from the church and artistic establishments that overrode these concerns. Hana Leaper and Polly Mills explore why this project was so high on the nation’s wartime cultural agenda. Rather than dismissing Bell’s and Grant’s work in Sussex as irrelevant to twentieth-century culture, their chapter demonstrates that Bell and Grant’s move to the countryside and privileging of the domestic, local, and everyday made them pivotal to a thriving rural modernist culture.

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