Book Description

In a February 1966 letter to her artistic confidant, RobertLowell, Elizabeth Bishop tellingly grouped four midcentury poets: Lowell, RandallJarrell, John Berryman, and herself. For Bishop--always wary of being pigeonholedand therefore reticent about naming her favorite contemporaries--it was a rareexplicit acknowledgment of an informal but enduring artistic circle that has evadedthe notice of literary journalists for more than forty years. Despite the privatenature of their dialogue, the group's members--Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, andBerryman--left a compelling record of their mutual interchange and influence.Drawing on an extensive range of published and archival sources, Thomas Travisanotraces these poets' creation of a surprisingly coherent postmodern aesthetic anddefines its continuing influence on Americanpoetry. The refusal of this "midcentury quartet,"as Travisano calls them, to voice a formalized doctrine, coupled with theirintuitive way of working, has caused critics to miss the coherence of their project.Travisano argues that these poets are not only successors to Pound, Auden, Stevens, and Eliot but postmodern explorers in their own right. In forging their ownaesthetic, characterized here as a postmodern mode of elegy, they encounteredsignificant resistance from their immediate modernist mentors Allen Tate, John CroweRansom, and Marianne Moore. Jarrell, whom othersof the group regarded as a critic of particular genius, was first described as apost-modernist in a 1941 review by Ransom that Travisano cites as the earliest knownuse of the term. In Jarrell's review of Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle six yearslater, he named Lowell a postmodernist and identified traits, among them the use ofpastiche, that are now considered by theorists such as Fredric Jameson asspecifically postmodern. And Bishop's inventiveness allowed her to adapt aself-exploratory mode often, but imprecisely, termed confessional to challengingforms such as the double sonnet, villanelle, andsestina. Each of these poets suffered adevastating loss during childhood and lived through the twentieth-century disastersof the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust, and the cold war. Thecontinual tension in their poetry between subjectivity and form, claims Travisano, reflects the plight of the fractured individual in a postmodern world. By arguing sosharply for the importance of this circle, Midcentury Quartet is certain to redrawthe map of postwar American poetry.