Quotation And Modern American Poetry

Quotation and Modern American Poetry

In this volume Elizabeth Gregory addresses a number of key issues surrounding the formation of the American poetic canon. Taking as her primary examples T. S. Eliot's Waste Land, William Carlos Williams' Paterson, and selected poems by Marianne Moore, she examines the ways in which modern American writers struggled with questions of literary authority and cultural identity in relation to pre-existing European models. Gregory focuses on these issues through analysis of the use of quotation in modern and postmodern literature, a practice that was strikingly divergent from the accepted use of literary allusion. Her introduction traces a history of quotation as it has been practiced in literature from classical to modern times. She then focuses on the texts of Eliot, Williams, and Moore--three central figures of American modernism whose work the author believes represents a spectrum of responses to the established European model of poetical discourse. Gregory's selection of Moore also allows her to deal with feminist concerns as they emerge in the more general modernist dialogue. How was a female writer to make use of a literary canon that traditionally excluded female participation? "The implications of Gregory's argument . . . will surely be of especial interest to feminist scholars of American poetry."--Lois Parkinson Zamora, University of Houston.

Quotation and Modern American Poetry

The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry gives readers a cutting-edge introduction to the kaleidoscopic world of American poetry over the last century. Offering a comprehensive approach to the debates that have defined the study of American verse, the twenty-five original essays contained herein take up a wide array of topics: the influence of jazz on the Beats and beyond; European and surrealist influences on style; poetics of the disenfranchised; religion and the national epic; antiwar and dissent poetry; the AIDS epidemic; digital innovations; transnationalism; hip hop; and more. Alongside these topics, major interpretive perspectives such as Marxist, psychoanalytic, disability, queer, and ecocritcal are incorporated. Throughout, the names that have shaped American poetry in the period--Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Sterling Brown, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Posey, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Larry Eigner, and others--serve as touchstones along the tour of the poetic landscape.