American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms - Softcover

Blasing, Mutlu Konuk

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300046073 ISBN 13: 9780300046076

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1989

Synopsis

This important study of major nineteenth - and twentieth - century American poets redefines poetic tradition in America. Mutlu Konuk Blasing argues against the prevailing view that Emerson stands alone at the head of a single line of succession. She shows, rather, that four nineteenth-century poets----Poe, Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson---each established an American poetic tradition.

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Reviews

Blasing wants to clear American poetry of its "centering figure," Ralph Waldo Emerson, instead identifying Emerson, Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson as that tradition's four informing figures. She then associates each with a "master trope"metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, respectivelythat serves as a "strategy" for organizing poems. The eight 20th-century poets investigated here, ranging from Eliot to Ashbery, belong in one of these camps. Blasing's thesis, a hodge-podge of linguistics and phenomenology that is muddled from the introduction on, serves to drive away the diligent reader, while the omission of historical Puritanism and its offshoots (Edwards, Alcott, Thoreau) prevents her from really getting at the roots of the American sensibility. Not a book, but a series of disjointed essays. Marc Widershien, Special Collections, State Lib. of Massachusetts
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300046073
• ISBN 13: 9780300046076
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248