Description
Book SynopsisIn this bold defense of so-called confessional poetry, Alan Williamson shows us that much of the best writing of the past twenty-five years is about the sense of being or having a self, a knowable personal identity. The difficulties posed by this subject help explain the fertility of contemporary poetic experimentfrom the jaggedness of the later work of Robert Lowell to the montagelike methods of John Ashbery, from the visual surrealism of James Wright and W. S. Merwin to the radical plainness of Frank Bidart. Williamson examines these and other poets from a psychological perspective, giving an especially striking reading of Sylvia Plath.
Table of Contents* Introduction *"I Am That I Am": The Ethics and Aesthetics of Personal Poetry * Real and Numinous Selves: A Reading of Plath * Language Against Itself: The Middle Generation of Contemporary Poets *"Surrealism" and the Absent Self * The Diffracting Diamond: Ashbery, Romanticism, and Anti-Art * The Future of Personal Poetry * Notes * Credits * Index
