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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition

The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition

Fredman, Stephen
Stephen, Fredman

Paperback

Series: Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Book 67

Literary CriticismPoetry CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 0521106745
ISBN13: 9780521106740
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: Apr 2 2009
Pages: 188
Weight: 0.62
Height: 0.43 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Stephen Fredman asserts in his latest work that American poetry is groundless--that each generation of American poets faces the problem of identity anew and discovers for itself fresh meaning. His argument focuses on four pairs--Eliot-Williams, Thoreau-Olson, Emerson-Duncan and Whitman-Creeley--and illustrates how Williams, Olson, Duncan and Creeley are all influenced by these predecessors to some extent but that ultimately their poetry is paradoxically grounded in an essential groundlessness. In order to demonstrate how approaches to groundlessness have persisted over time, Fredman explores the measures taken by these American poets to provide a provisional ground upon which to build their poetry: inventing idiosyncratic traditions, forming poetic communities, engaging in polemical prose, assessing all the dimensions of particular places, and treating words as emblematic and mysterious objects. At the very center of the book stands Charles Olson, whose work so dramatically articulates the whole range of issues arising from the American poet's anxious search for, and resistance to, an authentic and unified tradition.

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