Introspection and Contemporary Poetry

Download or read book Introspection and Contemporary Poetry written by Alan Bacher Williamson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this bold defense of so-called confessional poetry, Alan Williamson shows us that much of the best writing of the past twenty-five years is about the sense of being or having a self, a knowable personal identity. The difficulties posed by this subject help explain the fertility of contemporary poetic experiment--from the jaggedness of the later work of Robert Lowell to the montage--like methods of John Ashbery, from the visual surrealism of James Wright and W. S. Merwin to the radical plainness of Frank Bidart. Williamson examines these and other poets from a psychological perspective, giving an especially striking reading of Sylvia Plath.