Eager Imagination

My latest realization has to do with Pound's hypostasizing of desire (rather than letting it flow, Deleuze and Guattari style). The poe...

Ezra Pound's postcript to his translation of Remy de Gourmont's The Natural Philosophy of Love begins by accepting as a possibility...

One pretty obvious problem with much New Formalism is the tendency to marry the worst feature of free-verse (i.e. vapid conversationalism) w...

Ezra Pound's "Heather" makes use of the figure of a familiar, a supernatural spirit in the form of an animal that is linked to...

Vernon Shetley argues that poetry must become intellectually and personally challenging again. But part of this challenge is to chart a midd...

Justin Quinn's American Errancy begins with some of the same building blocks used in Rob Wilson's book (e.g. the sublime and Americ...

I'm not sure if Rob Wilson's The American Sublime is a good book, but it's definitely a tiresome one. It's written in that ...

I suppose anyone dealing with Ezra Pound and Imagism must respond to "In a Station of the Metro." I'm going to provide what is...

In Canto 116, Ezra Pound admitts to the inevitable outcome of his poetic project: But the beauty is not the madness Tho' my errors and w...

Albert Goldbarth is a prosy poet, given to creating small narratives full of vibrant and humorous detail. Rather than employing objects in ...

Utilizing object relations psychoanalytic theory, Juhasz theorizes women's writing and reading as atempts to work through the primary re...

It's productive to read Jorie Graham's Swarm after reading Kristeva, for the concept of boundaries is pointedly interrogated in the...

Julia Kristeva argues that the abject is not an object opposite the ego, but it is that part of the subject rejected by the superego. It is...

Harold Bloom constructs a complicated system of literary history based on poets and their anxieties in relation to their poetic influences. ...

Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism argues that postmodernism is a contradictory, historical, and political set of aesthetic pr...

Helen Vendler advocates "aesthetic criticism," which she suggests is not primarily about determining meaning or declaring cultural...

The temptation to jump neck-deep into Sylvia Plath's biography is strong, primarily because her life was tragic and important, but also ...

I find so many of Pound's poems in Lustra vexing because they don't work like "Alba." They don't give us the naturali...

I guess I've made a promise to write about the poetry of Ezra Pound.... Whoever wrote my oral exam paper proposal promised to shed light...

Lucille Clifton often writes at the intersection of personal past and history, attempting to recover what is personal about even large-scale...

In History and Class Consciousness , Georg Lukacs performs a close reading of Marx's Capital in order to focus on the effects of commod...

Marjorie Perloff explores the non-symbolist mode of poetry in The Poetics of Indeterminacy . She speaks of a tradition that is non-represent...

I'll confess up front that I haven't read the whole of Anti-Oedipus , but I don't think Deleuze and Guattari would be upset. Aft...

In Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry , Charles Altieri investigates the dominant mode of contemporary American poetry (in...

By pure, happy accident, I happened to be reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria" on the same night I was try...

In "Lastness," the final poem of his sequence "The Book of Nightmares," Galway Kinnell calls a poem a "concert of o...

I put Jung on my reading list because I felt that I would need to confront his concept of archetypes in order to fully consider poetic image...

John Berryman's "Dream Songs" give us much to appreciate with only the small price of a little also to bemoan. The formal reg...

Muriel Rukeyser's "Book of the Dead" is a fascinating read because it challenges the lyrical form to bear more narrative and d...

It's a bit surprising that Delmore Schwartz doesn't appear in either the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry or the Gioia/Mas...

There's no doubt much to say about William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity , but I want to hone in specifically on what he has to ...

The question one must confront in reading Lorine Niedecker is "What is produced through reduction?" For the reader, I think this o...

There's a tendency in vulgar Freudian criticism to transform images of verticality into dramas of male sexual desire, and I usually shun...

The rap against e. e. cummings that he was formally inventive but not philosophically challenging is, I think, a fair one. His typographica...

Timothy Steele's 1990 book is an interesting salvo in the conflict regarding the relative value of free verse and metrical verse. Steele...

W. K. Wimsatt's essay "The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery" is a typical -- and typically useful -- New Critical essay. H...

John Crowe Ransom's 1947 essay "The Iconography of the Master" begins in typical New Critical fashion by pointing out syntacti...

Eliot's important essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" has been roundly criticized because it actively deplores the one...

In writing about Emily Dickinson as a nineteenth-century precursor to modern American poetry, David Porter slowly constructs a definition of...

Edmund Burke insists that aesthetic responses are first and foremost physiological responses. When he suggests that the sublime operates b...

I set myself a difficult task by promising to read Aristotle's On Poetics . The goal was to gain insight into how poetry works, but Aris...

It is fascinating to open the Selected Poems of Claude McKay after first perusing poetry anthologies. First, the anthologies have been very...