Written in a fine and lucid prose style, T. S. Eliot and American Poetry presents a critical study of Eliot's major poems as it examines what America means to its poets. Eliot's contribution to a poetic dialogue on this subject with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, and other literary figures plays a significant role in this groundbreaking study. Investigating Eliot's literary inheritance through his familial traditions, represented particularly by his mother, Charlotte Eliot, and in terms of the American Renaissance, Lee Oser addresses all phases of Eliot's career as a poet. Following an introduction that reevaluates the importance of Poe and Whitman for Eliot and modernism, the discussion proceeds from Eliot's reaction against the progressive ethos of late Puritan culture, to the appearance in his writing of numerous figures of exile and disinheritance as an expression of lost American patrimony, to his flight from the realm of history, and his eventual return to the spiritual and cultural traditions of New England. A final chapter weighs Eliot's impact on Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, and Elizabeth Bishop. Through its dialectical view of American literary and intellectual history, T. S. Eliot and American Poetry constructs a practical methodology for comparing Eliot with other American poets. Juxtaposing Eliot's poems, lectures, and essays (including generous excerpts from Eliot's uncollected prose) with landmark texts by Emerson, Poe, Whitman, and many others, Oser engages in a deeper analysis of Eliot's Americanness than has hitherto been possible. In addressing Eliot's treatment of America as symbol and topos, the work presents a multifaceted chronicle of Eliot's development that enriches formalist and historicist approaches alike. T. S. Eliot and American Poetry makes numerous original contributions to the field of literary history. No previous work has so richly pursued Eliot's literary and familial inheritance, as well as his legacy to American poetry; the result is a highly nuanced perspective on contemporary debates about poetry, criticism, and culture.
Matthew Arnold; . The Influence of Science—Darwinism in T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer; . Art and Economics—John Ruskin and William Morris.” The second category was entitled “The Development of English Poetry” (nos.
As we have observed in Chapter 1, Section 3, he had not been permitted to read it as a boy. In Three Voyagers in Search of Europe: A Study of Henry James, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot (1966), Alan Holder devotes nearly four hundred pages ...
T.S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, 1888-1922
Despairing of his volatile, unstable wife, T. S. Eliot, at 44, resolves to put an end to the torture of his eighteen-year marriage.
Robert Lowell Lowell's “ Skunk Hour ” is often cited as the quintessential poem of the confessional movement , though its landmark status is due less to its content - which now strikes us as rather tame compared to some of the later ...
Provides a biography of American poet T.S. Eliot along with critical views of his work.
... of William Carlos Williams ; Vera M. Kutzinsky , Against the American Grain : Myth and History in William Carlos Williams , fay Wright , and Nicolas Guillen ; Terence Diggory , William Carlos Williams and the Ethics of Painting ...
Most important, this collection strongly reflects the peerless stylings that mark the American poetic experience as unique. Here, in one distinguished volume, are the many voices of the New World.
The Essential T.S. Eliot collects Eliot’s most lasting and important poetry in one career-spanning volume, now with an introduction from Vijay Seshadri, one of our foremost poets.
Selected Poems by Emily Dickinson: This collection of poems by “one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time” includes some of Dickinson’s best-known works, reflecting her thoughts on nature, life, death, the mind, ...