What Is It Then between Us?: Traditions of Love in American Poetry (Oxford World's Classics (Paperback)) - Softcover

Selinger, Eric Murphy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801484669 ISBN 13: 9780801484667

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Tracing the solitude of the American self, the difference between idolatrous and companionate affection, and the dream of an "America of love," Eric Murphy Selinger shows how such concerns can shape a poet's most intimate decisions about genre and form. His lucid, elegant prose illuminates not only well-known love poets, including Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams, but also more unexpected figures, notably Wallace Stevens and Mina Loy.

Like the poets he discusses, Selinger refuses to view love reductively. Rather, he takes the impulse to debunk love as part of his subject, whether it crops up in Puritan theology or contemporary literary theory. As he details Whitman's courtship of his readers, weighs the restorations of romance in H. D. and Ezra Pound, and demonstrates the bonds between poets as disparate as Robert Creeley and Robert Lowell, Selinger establishes love poetry as an essential American genre.

About this title

About the Author

Eric Murphy Selinger is Assistant Professor of English at DePaul University. His essays and reviews have appeared in Parnassus, the Washington Post, the Boston Phoenix, and elsewhere.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801484669
• ISBN 13: 9780801484667
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272