Author: Joan Romano Shifflett Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807173819 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 244
Book Description
Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell maintained lifelong, well-documented friendships with one another, often discussing each other’s work in private correspondence and published reviews. Joan Romano Shifflett’s Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell: Collaboration in the Reshaping of American Poetry traces the artistic and personal connections between the three writers. Her study uncovers the significance of their parallel literary development and reevaluates dominant views of how American poetry evolved during the mid-twentieth century. Familiar accounts of literary history, most prominently the celebration of Lowell’s Life Studies as a revolutionary breakthrough into confessional poetry, have obscured the significance of the deep connections that Lowell shared with Warren and Jarrell. They all became quite close in the 1930s, with the content and style of their early poetry revealing the impact of their mentors John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, whose aesthetics the three would ultimately modify and transform. The three poets achieved professional maturity and success in the 1940s, during which time they relied on one another’s honest critiques as they experimented with changes in subject matter and modes of expression. Shifflett shows that their works of the late 1940s were heavily influenced by Robert Frost. This period found Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell infusing ostensibly simple verse with multifaceted layers of meaning, capturing the language of speech in diction and rhythm, and striving to raise human experience to a universal level. During the 1950s, the three poets became public figures, producing major works that addressed the nation’s postwar need to reconnect with humanity. Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell continued to respond in interlocking ways throughout the 1960s, with each writer using innovative stylistic techniques to create a colloquy with readers that directed attention away from superficial matters and toward the important work of self-reflection. Drawing from biographical materials and correspondence, along with detailed readings of many poems, Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell offers a compelling new perspective on the shaping of twentieth-century American poetry.
Author: Joan Romano Shifflett Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807173827 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 220
Book Description
Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell maintained lifelong, well-documented friendships with one another, often discussing each other’s work in private correspondence and published reviews. Joan Romano Shifflett’s Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell: Collaboration in the Reshaping of American Poetry traces the artistic and personal connections between the three writers. Her study uncovers the significance of their parallel literary development and reevaluates dominant views of how American poetry evolved during the mid-twentieth century. Familiar accounts of literary history, most prominently the celebration of Lowell’s Life Studies as a revolutionary breakthrough into confessional poetry, have obscured the significance of the deep connections that Lowell shared with Warren and Jarrell. They all became quite close in the 1930s, with the content and style of their early poetry revealing the impact of their mentors John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, whose aesthetics the three would ultimately modify and transform. The three poets achieved professional maturity and success in the 1940s, during which time they relied on one another’s honest critiques as they experimented with changes in subject matter and modes of expression. Shifflett shows that their works of the late 1940s were heavily influenced by Robert Frost. This period found Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell infusing ostensibly simple verse with multifaceted layers of meaning, capturing the language of speech in diction and rhythm, and striving to raise human experience to a universal level. During the 1950s, the three poets became public figures, producing major works that addressed the nation’s postwar need to reconnect with humanity. Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell continued to respond in interlocking ways throughout the 1960s, with each writer using innovative stylistic techniques to create a colloquy with readers that directed attention away from superficial matters and toward the important work of self-reflection. Drawing from biographical materials and correspondence, along with detailed readings of many poems, Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell offers a compelling new perspective on the shaping of twentieth-century American poetry.
Author: Joan Romano Shifflett Publisher: ISBN: Category : American poetry Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
This dissertation explores the artistic and personal connections between three writers who helped change American poetry: Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell. All three poets maintained a close working relationship throughout their careers, particularly as they experimented with looser poetic forms and more personal poetry in the fifties and after. Various studies have explored their careers within sundry contexts, but no sustained examination of their relationships with one another exists. In focusing on literary history and aesthetics, this study develops an historical narrative that includes close-readings of primary texts within a variety of contexts. Established views of formalism, high modernism, and the New Criticism are interwoven into the study as tools for examining poetic structure within selected poems. Contexts concerning current criticism on these authors are also interlaced throughout the study and discussed in relation to particular historical and aesthetic issues. Having closely scrutinized the personal exchanges and creative output of all three poets, this study illuminates the significance of these writers' relationships to American poetry at mid-century and beyond. Though the more experimental schools of poetry would not reach their height until the 1950s, by the 1940s Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell were already searching for a new aesthetic. With friendships strong, correspondences frequent, and critical attention to one another's work constant throughout this decade, their poetry shifted in similar ways, both in content and style, by no coincidence. Ultimately, Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell purposely amended the formalist and high modernist aesthetics of their mentors in order to create poetry that engaged in an authentic exploration of selfhood within the real-life contexts of the post-World War II era. This project joins several recent critical works that fray the edges of hard-drawn boundaries that have become generally accepted truths about American literature. Despite the fact that these three artists enjoyed and benefited professionally from life-long, well-documented literary relationships with one another, previous histories have discouraged scholars from investigating these connections. As a case study, this dissertation points to a need to widen and reevaluate the current views of American poetry in the second half of the twentieth-century, so that we may more fully grasp the complexities and origins of contemporary poetry and forge a better understanding of American verse traditions.
Author: Robert Lowell Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: 0374712182 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 318
Book Description
A complete collection of Robert Lowell’s autobiographical prose, from unpublished writings about his youth to reflections on the triumphs and confusions of his adult life. Robert Lowell's Memoirs is an unprecedented literary discovery: the manuscript of Lowell’s lyrical evocation of his childhood, which was written in the 1950s and has remained unpublished until now. Meticulously edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, it serves as a precursor or companion to his groundbreaking book of poems Life Studies, which signaled a radically new prose-inflected direction in his work, and indeed in American poetry. Memoirs also includes intense depictions of Lowell’s mental illness and his determined efforts to recover. It concludes with Lowell’s reminiscences of other writers, among them T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Hannah Arendt, and Sylvia Plath. Memoirs demonstrates Lowell’s expansive gifts as a prose stylist and his powers of introspection and observation. It provides striking new evidence of the range and brilliance of Lowell’s achievement. Includes black-and-white photographs
Author: Suzanne Ferguson Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press ISBN: 9781572332294 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 376
Book Description
Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co.: Middle-Generation Poets in Context Takes on the oft-noted but little explored friendship of three of the most respected poets of the twentieth century. Editor Suzanne Ferguson collects eighteen essays that explore the literary, personal, and political affiliations of Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell, influential literary figures who flourished in the periods between modernism and postmodernism. Essay in the first section of the book directly compare the subjects, while sections on each of the poets follow. The contributors unpack received wisdom on the poets, revising and updating our conceptions. The multiple viewpoints reflect on one another, shedding provocative light on the group as a whole, and revealing the ways the study of poets in their historical context helps make them not only accessible but also relevant to today's reader. The Contributors: Edward Hirsch, Steven Gould Axelrod, Jeredith Merrin, Thomas Travisano, Diederik Oostdijk, Richard Flynn, Nelson Hathcock, Florian Hild, Stephen Burt, James McCorkle, Ross Leckie, Meg Schoerke, Lurel Kornhiser, Francesco Rognoni, Christian Sisack, Ernest J. Smith, and Elise Partridge. The Editor: Suzanne Ferguson is Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of Humanities, Emerita, at Case Western Reserve University. She is author of The Poetry of Randall Jarrell, editor of Critical Essays on Randall Jarrell, and coeditor of Literature and the Visual Arts in Contemporary Society. Her articles have appeared in Georgia Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Word and Image, and other journals.
Author: Randall Jarrell Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 568
Book Description
In this expanded edition of Randall Jarrell's letters, his widow, Mary, has added letters from Jarrell to Peter Taylor, publication of which was withheld during Taylor's lifetime. Taylor was, along with Robert Lowell, Jarrell's oldest and closest friend, and the inclusion of these incomparable letters adds another dimension of friendship, artistry, and intellect to a collection already noted for its behind-the-scenes glimpse of twentieth-century American literary history in the making.
Author: Stephanie Burt Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231500955 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 484
Book Description
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) was the most influential poetry critic of his generation. He was also a lyric poet, comic novelist, translator, children's book author, and close friend of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, and many other important writers of his time. Jarrell won the 1960 National Book Award for poetry and served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Amid the resurgence of interest in Randall Jarrell, Stephen Burt offers this brilliant analysis of the poet and essayist. Burt's book examines all of Jarrell's work, incorporating new research based on previously undiscovered essays and poems. Other books have examined Jarrell's poetry in biographical or formal terms, but none have considered both his aesthetic choices and their social contexts. Beginning with an overview of Jarrell's life and loves, Burt argues that Jarrell's poetry responded to the political questions of the 1930s, the anxieties and social constraints of wartime America, and the apparent prosperity, domestic ideals, and professional ideology that characterized the 1950s. Jarrell's work is peopled by helpless soldiers, anxious suburban children, trapped housewives, and lonely consumers. Randall Jarrell and His Age situates the poet-critic among his peers—including Bishop, Lowell, and Arendt—in literature and cultural criticism. Burt considers the ways in which Jarrell's efforts and achievements encompassed the concerns of his time, from teen culture to World War II to the Cuban Missile Crisis; the book asks, too, how those efforts might speak to us now.
Author: Joan Romano Shifflett
Author: Joan Romano Shifflett
Author: Joan Romano Shifflett
Author: Jarrell Randall
Author: Thomas Austenfeld
Author: Robert Lowell
Author: Suzanne Ferguson
Author: Randall Jarrell
Author: Mary Jarrell
Author: Stephanie Burt