Poetry, Politics, and Culture: Argument in the Work of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and WilliamsRoutledge, 2017 M07 5 - 290 pages A salient feature of modern poetics is its direct connection with cultural history and politics. Among the great American poets of the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams offer a significant contrast with T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Where the latter advocated a theocentric or reactionary response to the cultural crises of modernity, the former affirmed an essentially humanist and democratic social and aesthetic ethos. In Poetry, Politics, and Culture, Harold Kaplan offers a penetrating comparative study of these representative and distinctively influential poets.All four poets wrote in an atmosphere of cultural crisis following World War I, caught as they were between outmoded belief systems and various forms of artistic and political nihilism. While each believed in poetry as a source of cultural values and beliefs, they nevertheless experienced loss of confidence in their own vocation in a world characterized by scientific, rationalist thinking and the mundane struggle for survival. For each, therefore, the poetic imagination was a means of restoring order, or building a new civilization out of chaos. In trying to define a revitalized culture, the four exemplified the perennial quarrel between Europe and America. |
Contents
1 | |
Eliot and Pound Dissociations of Sensibility and Power | 15 |
Stevens and Williams The Source of Poetry | 95 |
Poetry and Politics | 207 |
Appendix A The Ethical Humanism of Emmanuel Levinas | 255 |
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Poetry, Politics, and Culture: Argument in the Work of Eliot, Pound, Stevens ... Harold Kaplan No preview available - 2017 |
Common terms and phrases
abstrac abstract Adagia American angel apocalyptic artist Bakhtin beauty become belief Bleistein called consciousness context contrast criticism cultural poetics death democracy democratic dissociation effect Eliot and Pound Emmanuel Levinas Eskin essay esthetic ethical existence experience expressed Ezra Pound face fact Fascism force Foucault freedom Gerontion hero Hugh Kenner human humanist poetics idea images imagination imagination’s immediacy language Levinas liberal democracy literary literature live major Mauberley meaning metaphor metaphysical Michel Foucault mind modern modernist moral naturalist nature necessary angel ontology Ozymandias person philosophic poem poet poetry politics post-structuralist postmodern Pound and Eliot protagonist Prufrock quotidian reader reality redemptive reductive religion religious response sense sensibility SLTR solipsism speaks spirit Stevens and Williams Supreme Fiction Sweeney Taylor & Francis theme theory things thinking thought tion tradition transcendence truth ultimate usury verse violence vitalist voice Wallace Stevens Waste Land words writing