W. S. Graham

The Poem as Art Object
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-0-19-284290-9
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 298 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 144 mm x 219 mm, Gewicht: 560 g

On the peripheries of UK poetry culture during his lifetime, W. S. Graham is now recognized one of the great poets of the twentieth century. In the first concerted study of Graham's poetics in a generation, David Nowell Smith argues that Graham is exemplary for the poetics of the mid-century: his extension of modernist explorations of rhythm and diction; his interweaving of linguistic and geographic places; his dialogue with the plastic arts; and the tensions that run through his work, between philosophical seriousness and play, solitude and sociality, regionalism and cosmopolitanism, the heft and evanescence of poetry's medium. Drawing on newly unearthed archival materials, Nowell Smith orients Graham's poetics around the question of the 'art object'. Graham sought to craft his poems into honed, finished 'objects'; yet he was also aware that the poem's 'finished object' is never wholly finished. Graham's work thus facilitates a broader reflection on language as a medium for art-making.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nowell Smith, David

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- 1: 'to make / An object'

- 2: 'He found his poetry arm'

- 3: 'A poem is made of words'

- 4: 'to interrupt silence into / Manmade durations'

- 5: 'my eye imprisoned by Art'

- 6: 'Speaking to you and not'

- 7: 'but I was only remembered'

- Postscript: 'Do not expect applause'

- Appendix 1: Composition Dates of Graham s Poems from Malcolm Mooney s Land and Implements in their Places

- Appendix 2: Archive Materials

Über Autor(innen)

David Nowell Smith is Associate Professor of Poetry/Poetics at the University of East Anglia. He is author of Sounding/Silence (Fordham University Press, 2013) and On Voice in Poetry (Palgrave, 2015), as well as numerous articles on the fundamental concepts of poetics.