The Poetry of Postmodernity
Anglo/American Encodings
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11 Result(s)
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Dennis Brown
Cultural Studies
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Book
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R. S. Thomas’s “Amen”
R. S. Thomas’s 1986 collection, Experimenting with an Amen,1 begins with the intriguing word “and”; the poem “Formula” commences “And for the soul/in its bone tent … ” (1). If the latter phrase reminds us of Sylv...
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Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel”
Sylvia Plath’s posthumous collection Ariel1 was published in 1965 and rapidly transformed her life and life’s work into a legend which remains compelling, controversial2 and proleptically contemporaneous. She is ...
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Conclusion
R. S. Thomas’s Experimenting with an Amen carries the argument of this book virtually into the nineties — especially if a realistic reader-reception period is allowed.1 However, all but one of the poets considere...
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Geoffrey Hill’s “Mercia”
“Genesis”, the first poem in Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Poems (1985),1 constitutes one of the most apparently self-confident declarations in recent writing in English. First published in the pamphlet Fantasy Poems...
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W. H. Auden’s “Hermes”
With a typical sense of timing (and placement), W. H. Auden signed his “Under Which Lyre”1 — a commissioned poem — “Harvard, 1946”. Both the year and the placing are resonant of the beginnings of the postmodern e...
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Ted Hughes’ “Crow”
Crows1 (1970) is probably the most jarringly innovative cycle of British poems written since the Second World War. It decisively parts company with the naturalistic “empiricism” through which Hughes’ career was l...
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John Ashbery’s “Wave”
The extraordinary free-verse meditation “A Wave” (1983) is the last essai in John Ashbery’s Selected Poems of 1987.1 The evocative title can be read as a cannily ambiguous try-on: it immediately suggests oceanic ...
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Introduction
I have called this book The Poetry of Postmodernity. The situational term “postmodernity” signals a residual suspicion of the word “postmodernism” — and of its necessary relevance to poetry of the recent era. Nev...
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Allen Ginsberg’s “America”
Ginsberg’s two most celebrated poems, “Howl” and “Kaddish”, are both love songs and requiems of a kind — the first for a “buddy” (Carl Solomon) and, by extension, for a generation, the second for his mother “N...
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John Berryman’s “Henry”
In the “Dream Songs”,1 written between the mid-fifties and late sixties, Sylvia Plath’s foreshortened career (along with the careers of other such poets as Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell and Delmore Schwartz) ...
