Approaching post-World War II poetry from a postmodern critical
perspective, this study challenges the prevailing assumption that
experimental forms signify political opposition while traditional
forms are politically conservative. Such essentialist alignments of
forms with extra-formal values, and the oppositional framework of
innovation versus conservation that they yield, reflect modernist
biases inappropriate for reading postwar poetry. Biasing defines
postmodern poetry as a break with modernism's valorization of
technique and its implicit collusion with technological progress.
She shows that four major postwar poets - Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth
Bishop, John Ashbery and James Merrill (two traditional and two
experimental) - cannot be read as politically conservative because
formally traditional or as culturally oppositional because formally
experimental. All of these poets acknowledge that no one form is
more natural than another, and no given form grants them a superior
position for judging cultural and political arrangements. Their
work plays an important cultural role precisely by revealing that
meanings and values do not inhere in forms but are always and
irreducibly rhetorical.
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