Oppen, George (1908–1984)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Shoemaker
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
Important Influence ◽  
New Work ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Louis Zukofsky ◽  
Actual Time ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
American Poets ◽  
Black Mountain

George Oppen was an innovative poet associated with the Objectivist movement in American poetry. Early in his poetic career, he appeared in both the ‘Objectivist’ number of Poetry magazine (1931) and An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology (1932), both edited by Louis Zukofsky (1904–1978). After a twenty-five year period of silence, Oppen re-emerged in the early 1960s, producing new work that took up a challenging stance toward the American scene of the time. He became an important influence on a number of younger American poets, including members of the Beat and Black Mountain schools. His volume Of Being Numerous (1968) addressed the ongoing war in Vietnam and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. Throughout his work, he sought to use poetry as a ‘test of truth,’ or at the very least a ‘test of sincerity,’ which he defined as follows: ‘there is a moment, an actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you construct a meaning from these moments of conviction’.

‘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.

Charles Olson (1910–1970)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Open Field ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
New American Poetry ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Black Mountain

Actively writing in the 1950s and 1960s, poet and critic Charles Olson is a key figure of both the New American Poetry and the Black Mountain school. He is best known for articulating—in his essay ‘Projective Verse’—the idea of ‘open-field’ poetics, opposed to inherited stanza form, as well as for his exploration of the long poem in The Maximus Poems.

The Objectivists

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Jaussen
Keyword(s):  
Second Generation ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Louis Zukofsky ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
Charles Reznikoff ◽  
Lorine Niedecker ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Many ◽  
First And Second Generation

The Objectivist poets were a group of first- and second-generation modernist writers who emerged in the USA during the 1930s. The writers most commonly associated with the movement are Louis Zukofsky (who first used the term ‘objectivist’ to describe poetry), Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Charles Rakosi, the British poet Basil Bunting, and Lorine Niedecker (other poets, such as William Carlos Williams, however, were published under the banner of ‘objectivist’). Most objectivist writing was characterized by an attention to specific particulars and the belief that poems could be material or social objects. Beyond these broad tendencies, however, each writer associated with the movement offered different definitions of ‘objectivist,’ and developed divergent writing practices. Consequently, the term has historical, critical, and evolutionary implications, referring both to specific literary publications, a core of poets whose relationships and affinities continued beyond the early 1930s, and the many subsequent attempts by poets and critics to use ‘objectivist’ as a critical concept.

‘In Sleep, in Thunder’: Elliott Carter'S Portrait of Robert Lowell

Tempo ◽  
1982 ◽  
pp. 2-9
Author(s):  
David Schiff
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
New Work ◽  
John Ashbery ◽  
Robert Lowell ◽  
Contemporary American Poetry ◽  
Initial Choice

Elliott Carter's new work for the London Sinfonietta, In Sleep, In Thunder, is a setting of six poems by Robert Lowell scored for tenor and fourteen instrumentalists and composed ‘in memory of the poet and friend’. With it Carter completes a triptych on contemporary American poetry that began with A Mirror on Which to Dwell (six poems of Elizabeth Bishop) and continued with Syringa, on the poem of that name by John Ashbery. Since Lowell himself suggested to the composer the initial choice of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry it seems appropriate that Lowell should receive a parallel (though posthumous) tribute.

Chance, Time and Silence: the New American Verse

1969 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-101
Author(s):  
Jonathan Raban
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
The Other ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
New American Poetry ◽  
Semantic Value ◽  
The One ◽  
Black Mountain ◽  
Black Mountain Poetry

The post-Pound, post-Carlos Williams movement in American verse, represented by such poets as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Ed Dorn, has for the most part been received with a deadly critical hush, particularly in England. Apart from the timely special issue of Ian Hamilton's Review in 1964 on Black Mountain Poetry, together with some discreet championing by Eric Mottram and Donald Davie, attention to the New Verse has been largely confined to the off-campus underground scene. The Black Mountaineers are generally thought to be the exclusive province of the Fulcrum Press, Calder and Boyars, the International Times and a tiny circulating broadsheet published from Cambridge called The English Intelligencer. But this critical neglect is, I think, a symptom of a genuine distress in literature departments of universities about the nature of contemporary verse. On the one hand, we have acquired a sophisticated terminology for discussing most of the verbal objects we have learned to call poems: this terminology entails certain assumptions about the working of language itself–that, for instance, the semantic value of an utterance is housed entirely in the words that compose that utterance, that language is a collection of multiply-suggestive symbols, that the operation of language is rational, logical and continuous. On the other hand, we have been recently confronted with a body of verse which either defies, or comes off very badly from, our conventional terminology. Its most striking features have been a metrical, syntactical and logical discontinuity; an insistence that language works, not symbologically, but phenomenologically, as a happening in time and space; that the silence in which a poem occurs has as great a semantic value as the words which are imposed on that silence. Given this battery of opposed assumptions, it is hardly surprising that the case of the New American Poetry offers the unengaging spectacle of criticism and poetics confronting one another with at best a dubious silence, at worst, bared teeth.

scholarly journals Contemporary American poetry in Slovenian criticism and translation : 1945 - 2005

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 21-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Igor Divjak
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
New York School ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Contemporary American Poetry ◽  
Post War ◽  
American Authors ◽  
Black Mountain

The article presents the Slovenian reception of five major groups in American post-war poetry -the Formalists, the Confessionals, the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and the New York School poets - as well as the reception of those prominent authors who cannot be classified in any of these groups. The analysis reveals which groups have attracted  most interest of the Slovenian critics and translators, when was the peak of their reception, which methods of interpretation have been used by the Slovenian critics, and to what extent has their judgement about certain contemporary American authors gradually changed.

scholarly journals NATURE, INACTION AND ILLUSION: THE INFLUENCE OF TAOISM ON AMERICAN POETRY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhu Lihong ◽  
Wang Feng
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Tao Te Ching ◽  
Beat Movement ◽  
Cultural Movements ◽  
American Poets

<p>Taoism is one of the most fundamental thoughts in China, and Laozi’s Taoist theory is even more brilliant, shining through the entire history of Chinese culture. Taoist culture and thoughts through translation have influenced American poetry directly or indirectly. Tao Te Ching (also Laozi) has become the most widely translated Chinese classic in history with the largest circulation overseas. Moreover, its translation has become second only to the Bible. At present, most scholars tend to comment on its translations, and there are few researches on the influence of Taoist thoughts after translation. Therefore, this paper intends to focus on the influences of Taoism on American poetry after translation. The study is based on three major cultural movements in the 20th century in the United States: the New Poetry Movement, the Beat Movement and the Deep Imagist Movement, taking typical poems in these movements as the research objects. The study intends to illustrate the great influences of Taoism on the three cultural movements in the 20th century in the United States by means of close reading, comparative analysis from the perspective of diachronic research. It first introduces the three American movements briefly, enumerates the poets who absorbed Taoist ideas in the movements, and then explains specifically what thoughts they absorbed from Taoism through the comparative analysis between the original Taoist thoughts and the thoughts in American poet’s poetry. It demonstrated in detail that American poets absorbed Taoist thoughts that have an impact on their poetry writing as poets. During the New Poetry Movement, the poets advocated the Taoists view of nature. During the Beat Movement, they paid close attention to the view of “inaction”, while the poets of the Deep Image Group concentrated on the illusion under the view of “homogeneous things”, which promoted the diversified development of American poetry.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0620/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

The Age of Auden

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aidan Wasley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Place ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
James Merrill ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Global Catastrophe ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
American Poets

W. H. Auden's emigration from England to the United States in 1939 marked more than a turning point in his own life and work—it changed the course of American poetry itself. This book takes, for the first time, the full measure of Auden's influence on American poetry. Combining a broad survey of Auden's midcentury U.S. cultural presence with an account of his dramatic impact on a wide range of younger American poets—from Allen Ginsberg to Sylvia Plath—the book offers a new history of postwar American poetry. For Auden, facing private crisis and global catastrophe, moving to the United States became, in the famous words of his first American poem, a new “way of happening.” But his redefinition of his work had a significance that was felt far beyond the pages of his own books. This book shows how Auden's signal role in the work and lives of an entire younger generation of American poets challenges conventional literary histories that place Auden outside the American poetic tradition. The book pays special attention to three of Auden's most distinguished American inheritors, presenting major new readings of James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Adrienne Rich. The result is a persuasive and compelling demonstration of a novel claim: In order to understand modern American poetry, we need to understand Auden's central place within it.

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.

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