The Poetics of the Everyday - Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse

Erscheinungsjahr 2010
ISBN: 978-0-231-14930-3
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 304 Seiten, Format (B × H): 162 mm x 232 mm, Gewicht: 592 g

Wallace Stevens once described the "malady of the quotidian," lamenting the dull weight of everyday regimen. Yet Stevens would later hail "that which is always beginning, over and over"& mdash;recognizing, if not celebrating, the possibility of fresh invention. Focusing on the poems of Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill, Siobhan Phillips eloquently positions everyday time as a vital category in modernist aesthetics, American literature, and poetic theory. Phillips reveals how, through particular but related means, each of these poets converts the necessity of quotidian experience into an aesthetic and experiential opportunity. In Stevens, Phillips analyzes the implications of cyclic dualism; in Frost, she explains the theoretical depth of a habitual "middle way;" in Bishop's work she finds the attempt to turn recurrent mornings into a "ceremony" rather than a sentence; and in Merrill, she shows how cosmic theories rely on daily habits. Phillips ultimately demonstrates that a poetics of everyday time contributes not only to a richer understanding of these four writers but also to descriptions of their era, estimations of their genre, and ongoing reconfigurations of the philosophical issues that literature reflects and illuminates.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Phillips, Siobhan

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Poetics of Everyday Time1. The Middle Living of Robert Frost2. The Faithful Mode of Wallace Stevens3. The Everyday Elegies of Elizabeth Bishop4. The Cosmic Dawnings of James MerrillConclusion: Everyday Pasts and Everyday FuturesNotesBibliographyIndex

Über Autor(innen)

Siobhan Phillips earned her Ph.D. at Yale University and is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Her writing has appeared in PMLA, Prospect, and Hudson Review.