Being Numerous

Poetry and the Ground of Social Life
Erscheinungsjahr 2011
ISBN: 978-0-691-14866-3
Verlag: Princeton University Press

Buch, Englisch, 272 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 231 mm, Gewicht: 340 g

Reihe: 20/21

"Because I am not silent," George Oppen wrote, "the poems are bad." What does it mean for the goodness of an art to depend upon its disappearance? In Being Numerous, Oren Izenberg offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. He argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience--and with poems.Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, Izenberg reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty--from Yeats's esoteric symbolism and Oppen's minimalism and silence to O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life--what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?--ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions--all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Izenberg, Oren

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatursoziologie, Gender Studies

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments vii

INTRODUCTION: Poems, Poetry, Personhood 1

CHAPTER ONE: White Thin Bone: Yeatsian Personhood 40

CHAPTER TWO: Oppen's Silence, Crusoe's Silence, and the Silence of Other Minds 78

CHAPTER THREE: The Justice of My Feelings for Frank O'Hara 107

CHAPTER FOUR: Language Poetry and Collective Life 138

CHAPTER FIVE: We Are Reading 164

Notes 189

Index 225

Über Autor(innen)

Izenberg, Oren
Oren Izenberg is a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois, Chicago.