Sincerity's Shadow: Self-Consciousness in British Romantic and Mid-Twentieth-Century American PoetryHarvard University Press, 2009 M06 30 - 256 páginas In a work of surprising range and authority, Deborah Forbes refocuses critical discussion of both Romantic and modern poetry. Sincerity's Shadow is a versatile conceptual toolkit for reading poetry. Ever since Wordsworth redefined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," poets in English have sought to represent a "sincere" self-consciousness through their work. Forbes's generative insight is that this project can only succeed by staging its own failures. Self-representation never achieves final sincerity, but rather produces an array of "sincerity effects" that give form to poetry's exploration of self. In essays comparing poets as seemingly different in context and temperament as Wordsworth and Adrienne Rich, Lord Byron and Anne Sexton, John Keats and Elizabeth Bishop, Forbes reveals unexpected convergences of poetic strategy. A lively and convincing dialectic is sustained through detailed readings of individual poems. By preserving the possible claims of sincerity longer than postmodern criticism has tended to, while understanding sincerity in the strictest sense possible, Forbes establishes a new vantage on the purposes of poetry. Table of Contents: Introduction 1. The Personal Universal Conclusion From the Conclusion "In spite of modern experiments in communal authorship, writing poetry remains one of the most individual of acts, and yet, because it provides the ground upon which the paradoxes of self-consciousness can move most freely, one of the acts most skeptical about the authority of any individual claim to self-understanding. . . . In undertaking its experiments, poetry may separate itself from certain contexts (economic, political, historical), but is itself as local and concrete as these contexts, an experience as well as a meditation on our experiences. In its particularity, its flexibility, its sensual and sonic complexity, its consideration of the extra-rational experiences of pleasure and desire, and above all in the ways in which it speaks with both more and less authority, more and less presence than an actual human voice, poetry offers us the experience of the unknown at the core of proposed self-knowledge. This is lyric poetry's enduring -- though not sole -- claim on us." |
Dentro del libro
Resultados 1-5 de 47
... mind . We might then describe the presence that we en- counter in these lines as the presence of the poet himself , expressing his innermost feelings . But when we examine the passage more closely , we discover that the very nature of ...
... mind, poetry is able to embody and explore self-consciousness with an urgency and inventiveness unmatched by other uses of language. If self-consciousness is characterized by its reversibility, by the ways 8 SINCERITY'S SHADOW.
... mind, a poem's success depends as much on the unruli- ness and tendentiousness of the subjectivity it presents as on the ways in which that subjectivity is contained by its strategies of self-consciousness. In this study I group poets ...
... mind an object of virtu which was not patched up and passed off as sound, and serves to remind us that the word in its early use referred primarily not to persons but to things . . . One spoke of sincere wine . . . simply to mean that ...
... mind , and , unfitting it for all voluntary exertion . . . reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor , ' " 13 and Rich echoes his con- cern almost two hundred years later : “ The society I was living and writ- ing in . . . smelled to ...
Contenido
1 | |
14 | |
Sincerity as Form in the Poetry of Wordsworth Lowell Rich and Plath | 47 |
The Monologues of Browning Eliot Berryman and Plath | 82 |
The Charismatic Poetry of Byron and Sexton | 116 |
The Poet as Observer in the Work of Keats Bishop and Merrill | 151 |
Conclusion | 190 |
Notes | 197 |
Index | 241 |