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." |
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... possible terms and assumptions for granted , and pressed my thinking further than it could have gone without her . I benefited greatly from James Engell's thoughtful guidance ; the care and clear - sightedness of his observations have ...
... , Mark Lorey, for all that his love makes possible in my work and life, and to my parents, Janet and Stephen Forbes, to whom this volume is dedi- cated. Contents 1 2 3 4 5 Introduction 1 The Personal VIII ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
... possible , his current state of 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 ...
... possible to argue that the discrepancies we have noticed are proof of the poet's insincerity : would a man as depressed and bereft of imagina- tion as this one claims to be , be able to write such a masterful poem ? But one feels more ...
... possible aesthetic goal , critics have been adept at listing all the reasons that statements insisting upon their own honesty must be treated with suspicion : no statement is made without at least an implied listener , a social context ...
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 |