Alan Marshall examines the nature of democratic thought and
expression in American experimental poetry, from Walt Whitman in
the mid-nineteenth century to George Oppen and Frank O'Hara in the
mid-late twentieth. The book's origins lie in Alexis de
Tocqueville's ambivalent discussion of 'Some Sources of Poetic
Inspiration in Democracies' in the second volume of his Democracy
in America. It begins with a chapter on Tocqueville and Whitman,
followed by a re-evaluation of the flawed republican humanism of
Ezra Pound in the light of the thought of Hannah Arendt. The other
main poets considered are Robert Creeley, Emily Dickinson, Mina
Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Muriel Rukeyser, Wallace Stevens and William
Carlos Williams.
American Poetry and Democratic Thought argues against the narrowly
ideological interpretation of politics that dominates contemporary
literary studies, an attitude that can be traced back to the
legacies of Marx and Freud, and conceives of ideology in
deterministic terms as unconscious political alignment. To that
extent it echoes Tocqueville's concern, in his great work, to
underline the differences between his own methods and perspectives
and the historical determinism of his contemporaries. The book
draws upon a wide range of thinkers, including Madison,
Tocqueville, Kant, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, Adorno, Riesman, Arendt,
Benhabib, and Cavell, as it seeks to expand and develop
Tocqueville's circumspect humanist critical trajectory. The
chapters are conceived as a series of innovative dialogical
constellations, to which the close reading of poetry is central.
The aim throughout is to measure the thought of the poets or their
poems against the thoughts of those who are more often called
thinkers.
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