Life Studies and For the Union Dead


Book Description

Robert Lowell, with Elizabeth Bishop, stands apart as the greatest American poet of the latter half of the twentieth century—and Life Studies and For the Union Dead stand as among his most important volumes. In Life Studies, which was first published in 1959, Lowell moved away from the formality of his earlier poems and started writing in a more confessional vein. The title poem of For the Union Dead concerns the death of the Civil War hero (and Lowell ancestor) Robert Gould Shaw, but it also largely centers on the contrast between Boston's idealistic past and its debased present at the time of its writing, in the early 1960's. Throughout, Lowell addresses contemporaneous subjects in a voice and style that themselves push beyond the accepted forms and constraints of the time.




Elements of Confessional Poetry


Book Description

This book revolves around the confessional poetry genre of English literature and it presents an insightful analysis of poems by Sylvia Plath and Kamala Das. The confessional elements elaborated upon by these authors mirror their respective cultural identities and personal turmoil in their lives. The discerning reader will appreciate their contributions in reference to their varied background and identities, which significantly shaped their thoughts and personalities to give a thrust to the ideas of feminism and confessionalism.




The Confessional Poets


Book Description

Confessional poetry as a genre was first characterized by the critic M. L. Rosenthal in 1959. It has become a potent force, and its practitioners the poetic voices of our time. The poetry is highly subjective, written with frankness and lack of re­straint, and focuses on the ugliness of life. Its leading practitioners, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass, and John Berryman, have all been recipients of the highest awards in literature, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Poetry. Robert Phillips, a critic and also a poet, here directs our attention to the genre in the first book on the subject. In addition to the poets noted above, he discusses the work of Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Stanley Kunitz, Delmore Schwartz, and Allen Ginsberg. Especially valuable are the author's defi­nition and historical review of the genre and his use of interviews and personal comments. An appraisal of the genre, his book is also a guide to new avenues open to poets writing today.




The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson


Book Description

Emily Dickinson, one of the most important American poets of the nineteenth century, remains an intriguing and fascinating writer. The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson includes eleven new essays by accomplished Dickinson scholars. They cover Dickinson's biography, publication history, poetic themes and strategies, and her historical and cultural contexts. As a woman poet, Dickinson's literary persona has become incredibly resonant in the popular imagination. She has been portrayed as singular, enigmatic, and even eccentric. At the same time, Dickinson is widely acknowledged as one of the founders of American poetry, an innovative pre-modernist poet as well as a rebellious and courageous woman. This volume introduces new and practised readers to a variety of critical responses to Dickinson's poetry and life, and provides several valuable tools for students, including a chronology and suggestions for further reading.




The Art of Confession


Book Description

"The Art of Confession tells the history of this cultural shift and of the movement it created in American art: confessionalism. Like realism or romanticism, confessionalism began in one art form, but soon pervaded them all: poetry and comedy in the 1950s and '60s, performance art in the '70s, theater in the '80s, television in the '90s, and online video and social media in the 2000s. Everywhere confessionalism went, it stood against autobiography, the art of the closed book. Instead of just publishing, these artists performed--with, around, and against the text of their lives." --




The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Since 1945


Book Description

Explores the ways in which American poetry has documented and sometimes helped propel the literary and cultural revolutions of the past sixty-five years.




The Elements of San Joaquin


Book Description

A timely new edition of a pioneering work in Latino literature, National Book Award nominee Gary Soto's first collection (originally published in 1977) draws on California's fertile San Joaquin Valley, the people, the place, and the hard agricultural work done there by immigrants. In these poems, joy and anger, violence and hope are placed in both the metaphorical and very real circumstances of the Valley. Rooted in personal experiences—of the poet as a young man, his friends, family, and neighbors—the poems are spare but expansive, with Soto's voice as important as ever. This welcome new edition has been expanded with a crucial selection of complementary poems (some previously unpublished) and a new introduction by the author.




Chiu's House of Lovely Animals


Book Description

NEW EDITION 2014 EDITION: Chiu's House of Lovely Animals: Confessional Poetry Written by a Ridiculously Funny Asian American Manic Depressive, Priscilla Lee's second collection of poems, explores the peculiarities of everyday life living with an insane politically incorrect husband and a burrito-eating cat. Irreverent, sometimes funny, sometimes dark, these personal poems deal with identity, marriage, wearing the wrong underwear, and bad Chinese food.




Sylvia Plath's Selected Poems


Book Description

Sylvia Plath is one of the defining voices in twentieth-century poetry. This classic selection of her work, made by her former husband Ted Hughes, provides the perfect introduction to this most influential of poets. The poems are taken from Sylvia Plath's four collections Ariel, The Colossus, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, and include many of her most celebrated works, such as 'Daddy', 'Lady Lazarus' and 'Wuthering Heights'.




Girls on the Run


Book Description

John Ashbery’s wild, deliriously inventive book-length poem, inspired by the adventures of Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls Henry Darger, the prolific American outsider artist who died in 1973, leaving behind over twenty thousand pages of manuscripts and hundreds of artworks, is famous for the elaborate alternate universe he both constructed and inhabited, a “realm of the unreal” where a plucky band of young girls, the Vivians, helps lead an epic rebellion against dark forces of chaos. Darger’s work is now renowned for its brilliant appropriation of cultural ephemera, its dense and otherworldly prose, and its utterly unique high-low juxtaposition of popular culture and the divine—some of the very same traits that decades of critics and readers have responded to in John Ashbery’s many groundbreaking works of poetry. In Girls on the Run, Ashbery’s unmatched poetic inventiveness travels to new territory, inspired by the characters and cataclysms of Darger’s imagined universe. Girls on the Run is a disquieting, gorgeous, and often hilarious mash-up that finds two radical American artists engaged in an unlikely conversation, a dialogue of reinvention and strange beauty.




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