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James Merrill, Postmodern Magus

James Merrill, Postmodern Magus PDF Author: Evans Lansing Smith
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587297647
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Book Description
One of the unique voices in our century, James Merrill was known for his mastery of prosody; his ability to write books that were not just collected poems but unified works in which each individual poem contributed to the whole; and his astonishing evolution from the formalist lyric tradition that influenced his early work to the spiritual epics of his later career. Merrill's accomplishments were recognized with a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for Divine Comedies and a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 for The Changing Light at Sandover. In this meticulously researched, carefully argued work, Evans Lansing Smith argues that the nekyia, the circular Homeric narrative describing the descent into the underworld and reemergence in the same or similar place, confers shape and significance upon the entirety of James Merrill’s poetry. Smith illustrates how pervasive this myth is in Merrill’s work – not just in The Changing Light at Sandover, where it naturally serves as the central premise of the entire trilogy, but in all of the poet’s books, before and after that central text. By focusing on the details of versification and prosody, Smith demonstrates the ingenious fusion of form and content that distinguishes Merrill as a poet. Moving beyond purely literary interpretations of the poetry, Smith illuminates the numerous allusions to music, art, theology, philosophy, religion, and mythology found throughout Merrill’s work.

James Merrill, Postmodern Magus

James Merrill, Postmodern Magus PDF Author: Evans Lansing Smith
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587297647
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Book Description
One of the unique voices in our century, James Merrill was known for his mastery of prosody; his ability to write books that were not just collected poems but unified works in which each individual poem contributed to the whole; and his astonishing evolution from the formalist lyric tradition that influenced his early work to the spiritual epics of his later career. Merrill's accomplishments were recognized with a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for Divine Comedies and a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 for The Changing Light at Sandover. In this meticulously researched, carefully argued work, Evans Lansing Smith argues that the nekyia, the circular Homeric narrative describing the descent into the underworld and reemergence in the same or similar place, confers shape and significance upon the entirety of James Merrill’s poetry. Smith illustrates how pervasive this myth is in Merrill’s work – not just in The Changing Light at Sandover, where it naturally serves as the central premise of the entire trilogy, but in all of the poet’s books, before and after that central text. By focusing on the details of versification and prosody, Smith demonstrates the ingenious fusion of form and content that distinguishes Merrill as a poet. Moving beyond purely literary interpretations of the poetry, Smith illuminates the numerous allusions to music, art, theology, philosophy, religion, and mythology found throughout Merrill’s work.

Mysticism in Postmodernist Long Poems

Mysticism in Postmodernist Long Poems PDF Author: Joe Moffett
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611461634
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 179

Book Description
Written from a literary critic’s perspective, Mysticism in Postmodernist Long Poems borrows insights from Religious Studies and critical theory to examine the role of spirituality in contemporary poetry, specifically the genre of the long poem. Descending from Whitman’s Song of Myself, the long poem is often considered the American twentieth-century equivalent of the epic poem, but unlike the epic, it carries few generic expectations aside from the fact that it simply must be long. This makes the form particularly pliable as a tool for spiritual inquiry. The period following World War II is often described as a secular age, but spirituality continued as a concern for poets, as evidenced by this study. These writers look beyond conventional faith systems and instead seek individual paths of understanding; they engage in mysticism, in other words. With chapters on H.D. and Brenda Hillman, Robert Duncan, James Merrill, Charles Wright, and Galway Kinnell and Gary Snyder, this study demonstrates how these poets engage the culture of consumption in the postwar years at the same time they search for opportunities for transcendence. Not content to throw over the earthly in favor of the otherworldly, these poets reject the familiar binary of the worldly and metaphysical to produce distinctive paths of spiritual understanding that fuel what Wright calls a “contemplation of the divine.”

The Lyric in the Age of the Brain

The Lyric in the Age of the Brain PDF Author: Nikki Skillman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674545125
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
Science has transformed understandings of the mind, supplying physiological explanations for what once seemed transcendental. Nikki Skillman shows how lyric poets—caught between a reductive scientific view and naïve literary metaphors—struggled to articulate a vision of consciousness that was both scientifically informed and poetically truthful.

Gale Researcher Guide for: After the Broken Home: Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and James Merrill

Gale Researcher Guide for: After the Broken Home: Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and James Merrill PDF Author: Alan Feldman
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
ISBN: 1535848936
Category : Study Aids
Languages : en
Pages : 13

Book Description
Gale Researcher Guide for: After the Broken Home: Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and James Merrill is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures

MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Languages, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 1690

Book Description


Choice

Choice PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Academic libraries
Languages : en
Pages : 624

Book Description


Cauda Pavonis

Cauda Pavonis PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Alchemy in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Book Description


The Changing Light at Sandover

The Changing Light at Sandover PDF Author: James Merrill
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 9780689112836
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 560

Book Description
Mystical poems explore the author's experiences communicating with a spirit named Ephraim through an Ouija board

Figuring Poesis

Figuring Poesis PDF Author: Evans Lansing Smith
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
Figuring Poesis focuses on the interrelations between myth and geometrical symbolism in literature since the end of the Second World War. Detailed readings of a wide range of works contextualize allusions to the myths of the apocalypse, the great goddess, alchemy, the labyrinth, and the descent to the underworld. The geometrical symbols that occur in conjunction with these myths serve as images of poesis and hermeneusis. The conclusion brings postmodernist paintings and architecture into the discussion, and develops an iconography of form.

Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy

Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy PDF Author: David Ray Griffin
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791480305
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
Postmodern philosophy is often dismissed as unintelligible, self-contradictory, and as a passing fad with no contribution to make to the problems faced by philosophers in our time. While this characterization may be true of the type of philosophy labeled postmodern in the 1980s and 1990s, David Ray Griffin argues that Alfred North Whitehead had formulated a radically different type of postmodern philosophy to which these criticisms do not apply. Griffin shows the power of Whitehead's philosophy in dealing with a range of contemporary issues—the mind-body relation, ecological ethics, truth as correspondence, the relation of time in physics to the (irreversible) time of our lives, and the reality of moral norms. He also defends a distinctive dimension of Whitehead's postmodernism, his theism, against various criticisms, including the charge that it is incompatible with relativity theory.