By Andrew Epstein
Even though it has lengthy been average to visualize the archetypal American poet making a song a solitary "Song of Myself," a lot of the main enduring American poetry has really been preoccupied with the drama of friendship. during this lucid and soaking up learn, Andrew Epstein argues that an obsession with either the pleasures and difficulties of friendship erupts within the "New American Poetry" that emerges after the second one international warfare. through targeting essentially the most major postmodernist American poets--the "New York college" poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and their shut modern Amiri Baraka--Beautiful Enemies finds a basic paradox on the middle of postwar American poetry and tradition: the avant-garde's dedication to individualism and nonconformity runs at once counter to its personal valorization of group and collaboration. in truth, Epstein demonstrates that the conflict among friendship and nonconformity complicates the mythical alliances cast by way of postwar poets, turns into a essential subject within the poetry they created, and leaves modern writers with a classy legacy to barter. instead of easily celebrating friendship and poetic neighborhood as nurturing and encouraging, those poets symbolize friendship as a type of exhilarating, maddening contradiction, a website of allure and repulsion, affinity and rivalry.
demanding either the reductive reviews of yank individualism and the idealized, seriously biographical celebrations of literary camaraderie one reveals in a lot serious dialogue, this booklet offers a brand new interpretation of the strange dynamics of yank avant-garde poetic groups and the function of the person inside them. via situating his broad and revealing readings of those hugely influential poets opposed to the backdrop of chilly battle cultural politics and in the context of yank pragmatist suggestion, Epstein uncovers the collision among radical self-reliance and the siren name of the interpersonal on the center of postwar American poetry.
Read Online or Download Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry PDF
Similar American Literature books
Selected by means of Eliot himself, the poems during this quantity symbolize the poet’s most vital paintings earlier than 4 Quartets. integrated this is the most celebrated verse in glossy literature-”The Love music of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” “The Waste Land,” “The hole Men,” and “Ash Wednesday”-as good as many different high-quality choices from Eliot’s early paintings.
"Something Dreadful and Grand": American Literature and The Irish-Jewish Unconscious
Intricate analogies among Irish and Jewish heritage, among Irish and Jewish subjectivities, happen with astonishing frequency all through American literature. They remember James Joyce's Leopold Bloom and episodes of Ulysses, Douglas Hyde's analogies in the course of the Celtic Revival among studying Hebrew and studying Irish, and a myriad of claims of an strange dating among those peoples that is going past comparisons in their respective diasporic histories.
The transcendentalist circulation is mostly famous to be the 1st significant watershed in American literary and highbrow historical past. Pioneered by way of Emerson, Thoreau, Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott (among others), Transcendentalism supplied a springboard for the 1st exceedingly American forays into highbrow tradition: faith and spiritual reform, philosophy, literature, ecology, and spiritualism.
Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture
The belief of a typical American tradition has been in retreat for a iteration or extra. Arguments emphasizing distinction have discredited the grand man made stories that marginalized teams and views at odds with the grasp narrative. floor and intensity: the hunt for Legibility in American tradition is a clean try and revitalize an interpretive evaluation.
Extra info for Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry
