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

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.

1. American poetry’s two characteristics

“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.

5. On the present and future of American poetry

“On the present and future of American poetry” argues that the contemporary poets who follow Robert Lowell’s model of blending public and private history often turn against the particular hierarchies that made the Lowell name seem “significant, illustrative, American, etc.” Instead, contemporary poets have taken up the challenge of presenting a new account of American history and culture. They introduce a new set of important names of people and places. The poets of the Black Lives Matter movement, for instance, elegize African American victims of police violence. At the same time, their poems add new variations of the two characteristics of American: the perceived need for distinctiveness and its transnationalism.

3. Convention and idiosyncrasy

“Convention and idiosyncrasy” shows how the successful use of recognizable artistic conventions can help a poet to enter a literature and a culture that seeks to exclude them. It can moderate skepticism, even hostility, and sanction an outsider’s admittance into a community. At the same time, respect for poetic convention hardly reigns uncontested in American literary culture. With several notable exceptions, American poetry and, even more so, its scholarly discussions value a different quality. American poets and readers alike often appreciate idiosyncrasy and the associated values of disruption, originality, innovation, strangeness, and surprise. Poets as different Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Charles Bernstein, and Maggie Smith consider the competing imperatives of convention and idiosyncrasy.

American Poetry: A Very Short Introduction

American Poetry: A Very Short Introduction proposes a new theory of American poetry showing that two characteristics mark the vast, contentious literature. On the one hand, several of its major poets and critics claim that America needs a poetry equal to the country’s own distinctiveness. On the other hand, American poetry welcomes techniques, styles, and traditions that originate from outside the country. Its influences range far beyond America’s borders. The force of these two competing characteristics drives both individual accomplishment and the broader field. The story moves through historical periods and honors the poets’ artistry by paying close attention to the verse forms, meters, and styles they employ. Its examples range from Anne Bradstreet, writing a century before America’s establishment, to the poets of the Black Lives Matter movement. Individual chapters consider how other major figures such as T. S. Eliot, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson emphasize convention or idiosyncrasy and turn to American English as an important artistic resource.

4. Auden and Eliot

“Auden and Eliot” looks at the poetic careers of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, which both trouble the very idea of a national literature. The British-born Auden immigrated to the United States and the American-born Eliot immigrated to England. Both wrote significant poems before and after their moves. An examination of Auden and Eliot’s poetry allows us to consider how these two major poets understood American poetry and their place in it, the resources it gave them, and the limitations that frustrated them. Generations of readers have puzzled over these questions since they involve two major authors and the intersections of individual lives with complex issues of nationhood, including national identity, anxiety, and pride. In short, their work enriches the story of American poetry by complicating it.