American Poetry : The Rhetoric of Its Forms

Blasing, Mutlu K.

ISBN 10: 0300037937 / ISBN 13: 9780300037937

Published by Yale University Press, 1987

Former library book; may include library markings. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages. Seller Inventory # 15861842-20

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.

From Library Journal: 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.

Bibliographic Details

Title: American Poetry : The Rhetoric of Its Forms
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication Date: 1987
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Good