, to see if you have full access to this publication.
Book Titles No access
Poems Containing History
Twentieth-Century American Poetry's Engagement with the Past
Authors:
Publisher:
2013
Summary
Ezra Pound’s definition of an epic as “a poem containing history” raises questions: how can a poem “contain” history? And if it can, does it help us to think about history in ways that conventional historiography cannot? Poems Containing History: Twentieth-Century American Poetry’s Engagement with the Past, by Gary Grieve-Carlson, argues that twentieth-century American poetry has “contained” and helped its readers to think about history in a variety of provocative and powerful ways. Tracing the discussion of the relationship between poetry and history from Aristotle’s Poetics to Norman Mailer’s The Armiesof the Night and Hayden White’s Metahistory, the book shows that even as history evolves into a professional, academic discipline in the late nineteenth century, and as its practitioners emphasize the scientific aspects of their work and minimize its literary aspects, twentieth-century American poets continue to take history as the subject of their major poems. Sometimes they endorse the views of mainstream historians, as Stephen Vincent Benét does in John Brown’s Body, but more often they challenge them, as do Robert Penn Warren in Brother to Dragons, Ezra Pound in TheCantos, or Charles Olson in TheMaximus Poems. In Conquistador, Archibald MacLeish illustrates Aristotle’s claim that poetry tells more philosophical truths about the past than history does, while in Paterson, William Carlos Williams develops a Nietzschean suspicion of history’s value. Three major American poets—T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets, Hart Crane in TheBridge, and Carolyn Forché in The Angel of History—present different challenges to professional historiography’s assumption that the past is best understood in strictly material terms. Poems Containing History devotes chapters to each of these poets and offers a clear sense of the seriousness with which American poetry has engaged the past, as well as the great variety of those engagements.
Keywords
Search publication
Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2013
ISBN-Print
978-0-7391-6755-7
ISBN-Online
978-0-7391-6756-4
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
215
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Preface No access
Acknowledgments No access
1 History and Poetry No access Pages 1 - 30
2 Stephen Vincent Benét: John Brown’s Body and the Meaning of the Civil War No access Pages 31 - 46
3 MacLeish’s Conquistador: History as Metaphor No access Pages 47 - 60
4 A Usable Past? Robert Penn Warren’s Brother to Dragons No access Pages 61 - 78
5 T. S. Eliot: Awaking from the Nightmare of History No access Pages 79 - 98
6 The Varieties of History in Hart Crane’s The Bridge No access Pages 99 - 120
7 Carolyn Forché: History and Theophany No access Pages 121 - 136
8 Ezra Pound and the Problem of History No access Pages 137 - 160
9 Getting the News from Poems: William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain and Paterson No access Pages 161 - 180
10 Charles Olson’s Maximus: Looking for Oneself, Looking for the Evidence No access Pages 181 - 202
