... are speculations on how poetic histories might be written di√erently, less monolithically, more flexibly, and with greater at- tention to the fact that the problem with any category, as Elizabeth Bishop once commented wryly, is that ‘‘none of the books ever gets it right While the borders of late...

... and oral cultures. Lauri Ramey s A History of African American Poetry (Cambridge) is less an attempt to provide a compre- hensive history than it is an intervention in the rapidly growing critical discourse on African American poetics. By detailing the overlapping histories of the poetry and its critical...

...- ingly Jean Toomer and U.S. poetic history—a number of ambitious and provocative monographs do distinguish this year’s scholarly output. Comprehensive accounts of 20th-century aesthetics (anchored firmly in modernity) include Jennifer Ashton’s From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry...

...Anita Plath Helle © 2000 Duke University Press 2000 18 Poetry: The 1940s to the Present Anita Plath Helle Cultural studies of poetry and poetics are burgeoning. When the White House orchestrated a gathering of American poets laureate Rita Dove, Robert Hass, and Robert Pinsky for a celebration...

... but indirect. In all, the book is an interesting study of poetic reception in the public and political sphere and the translation of poetic vision into political capital. Developing a more nuanced conceptualization of poetry’s role in the political sphere, Nicholas Hengen Fox’s “Poetry, Recognition...

... collection, also comes clear in Emily Dickinson’s Marble Disc: A Poetics of Renunciation and Science by the Japanese scholar Hiroko Uno. Among new articles and chapters, contextual and interpre- tive scholarship also prevails, with significant new work in historical and cultural criticism, comparative...

... for it. In James Merrill and W. H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence Piotr Gwiazda notes that even before The Changing Light at Sandover Merrill outstripped Auden in making his homo- sexuality an overt subject in his poetry but that his “rhetoric of inau- thenticity” was nevertheless vital...

... 20 percent of the U.S. population and together producing some of the most vibrant American poetry in recent decades—does no credit to the volume’s aspiration to “represent the most important poetic developments in the period . . . in the context of the social, political, professional...

... poetry is currently headed. Lynn Keller’s Thinking Poetry: Readings in Contemporary Women’s Exploratory Poetics offers supporting evidence and indicates how diversely experi- mental and exploratory contemporary American women’s poetry is. Norman Finkelstein’s On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred...

... criticism. In Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality (Chicago) Dworkin makes a methodological claim for paying close attention to the material aspects of language. Building on his previous critical studies of avantgarde poetry and art, Reading the Illegible (2003) and No Medium (2013), he argues...

... the art are less prone to be organized around a single author, period, or nation. The most remarkable exceptions to this otherwise accurate generaliza- tion are two impressive new monographs dedicated exclusively to Hart Crane’s poetry and poetics, Brian Reed’s Hart Crane: After His Lights...

...Amanda Gailey; Michelle Kohler 4  Whitman and Dickinson Amanda Gailey and Michelle Kohler The scholarship on Whitman and Dickinson in 2015 had a few com- mon refrains: the poets’ responses to the Civil War and to 19th-century scientific understanding, explorations of poetics, early...

..., or social—in spite of the poetic forms she uses.” Ellis gets things the right way around. Closely examining notebooks, drawings, letters, fragments, drafts, and apparently finished but unpublished poems (some now in Quinn’s Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox) and observing their afterlife in published...

... another that dis- cusses the artistic impact of the political Left on Brown, Langston Hughes, and other African American poets. A book about the intertex- tuality of H.D. and Sapphic Hellenism adds to a growing discussion. Another study of modernism’s ‘‘queer poetics’’ in five women...

... focuses on metaphor in her article ‘‘Momentary Stays, Exploding Forces: A Cognitive Linguistic Approach to the Poetics of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost’’ ( JEngL 30: 73–90), setting out to demonstrate that Dickinson’s work is informed by ‘‘a clearly defined if subtle poetics’’ that is quite...

... calls the two poets “the finest among their generation, a generation that came to maturity around the beginning of the Second World War.” Oppen is also well served by Thinking Poetics: Essays on George Oppen. Then there is Charles Olson, a member of the same generation whom some revere...

...- lects 18 essays on Hughes, the topics ranging from the poet’s work with blues forms to his political poetics, from his biographical relationships to his relationship to children’s literature. A number of essays focus on Hughes’s prose, from his novel Not Without Laughter to his collection...

..., and a volume of watercolor drawings is now part of her oeuvre. A new essay collection, Elizabeth Bishop in the 21st Century, assesses the editions’ impact on our sense of Bishop’s poetic achievement, which now encompasses twice as many poems as in the Complete Poems (1979). It has also been a good...

... Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org). Ed Folsom explores some associations between Whitman and Emily Dickinson in “Transcendental Poetics: Emerson, Higginson, and the Rise of Whitman and Dickinson,” as does William C. Spengemann in Three American Poets: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman...

... of “lived intersubjectivity” demand a poetic both bold (in that it ventures into the volatile realm of politics and speech) and humble (in that Oppen recognizes human limitation). Marshall’s methodology has both its strength and its weakness. He does not impose a Procrustean ideological grid...