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2 results

  • Chapter 14 - Warren and Jarrell

  • from Part IV - Contemporaries
  • Edited by Thomas Austenfeld, University of Fribourg, Grzegorz Kość, University of Warsaw
  • Book:
    Robert Lowell In Context
    Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    04 April 2024, pp 149-160

  • Summary

    The chapter pushes against the conventional narrative that Lowell’s breakthrough style of the 1950s, the colloquial and conversational diction of Life Studies, originated mostly with his immersion in William Carlos Williams’s poetry and his fascination with the Beats and Allen Ginsberg. Rather, it argues that Lowell fashioned the new confessional style out of inspirations and influences he had received from Robert Penn Warren and Randall Jarrell, who had shown sustained interest in how the practice of prose writing could refresh postwar poetic styles. Weaving together multiple strands of neglected evidence from their overlapping biographies, their letters, and reviews, Joan Shifflett argues that Life Studies owes more to Warren’s Brother to Dragons and Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution than has previously been acknowledged.

  • Chapter 38 - The Uses of Authenticity

  • from Part IV - Beyond Modernism: American Poetry, 1950–2000
  • Edited by Alfred Bendixen, Princeton University, New Jersey, Stephen Burt, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of American Poetry
    Published online:
    05 December 2014
    Print publication:
    27 October 2014, pp 869-893

  • Summary

    Elizabeth Bishop noted that her poetry differed both from the standardized somewhat machine-made Academic poem and from poetry that comes through with a sort of shocking vulgarity and coarseness of mind. Bishop, as Lowell's commentary at the 1964 reading notes, was also a poet who refused to write the standard academic poem fashionable at mid-century, nor did she write the kind of confessional poem that was quickly supplanting it. The critical ambivalence about Losses surfaced in part because Jarrell's postwar subject matter was emerging in that volume, in poems such as Moving. Like Jarrell's late poem The Lost World, moving also frames the perceptions of the child against the more jaded reflections of the adult. The woman's predicament hearkens back to Jarrell's polemical essays criticizing American consumer culture, as she wanders the aisles of the supermarket among the detergents cheer, joy and all vainly seeking their emotional equivalents.