In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville prophesied that American
writers would slight, even despise, form--that they would favor the
sensational over rational order. He suggested that this attitude
was linked to a distinct concept of democracy in America. Exposing
the inaccuracies of such claims when applied to poetry, Stephen
Cushman maintains that American poets tend to "overvalue" the
formal aspects of their art and in turn overestimate the
relationship between those formal aspects and various ideas of
America. In this book Cushman examines poems and prose statements
in which poets as diverse as Emily Dickinson and Ezra Pound
describe their own poetic forms, and he investigates links and
analogies between poets' notions of form and their notions of
"Americanness.."
The book begins with a brief discussion of Whitman, who said,
"The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem."
Cushman takes this to mean that American poetry has succeeded in
making fictions about itself which persuade its readers that its
uniqueness transcends merely geographical boundaries. He explores
the truth of this statement by considering the Americanness of
Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, and A. R. Ammons. He
concludes that the uniqueness of American poetry lies not so much
in its forms as in its formalism and in the various attitudes that
formalism reveals.
Originally published in 1993.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand
technology to again make available previously out-of-print books
from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press.
These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these
important books while presenting them in durable paperback
editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly
increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the
thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since
its founding in 1905.
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