Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situations
Peter Robinson
Abstract
This book contains a sequence of chapters exploring ways that selves and situations interact and become imaginatively identified in poems. The chapters demonstrate and exemplify how poems can be both attached to and detached from the culture, society, and conditions in which they were written. Each closely-detailed study draws out and underlines both the ubiquity and elusiveness of the self in the situation of the text. The poems are also revealed to be focal points for relations between readerly and writerly selves, and their situations in and over time. Alongside these interrelated concerns, ... More
This book contains a sequence of chapters exploring ways that selves and situations interact and become imaginatively identified in poems. The chapters demonstrate and exemplify how poems can be both attached to and detached from the culture, society, and conditions in which they were written. Each closely-detailed study draws out and underlines both the ubiquity and elusiveness of the self in the situation of the text. The poems are also revealed to be focal points for relations between readerly and writerly selves, and their situations in and over time. Alongside these interrelated concerns, the chapters look at ways in which poets can create and create out of relationships of a more or less trusting kind with their poems' implied, and by those means, actual readers. It also includes cases that reveal the relative absence of or wish to do without such relationships. Just as selves and situations are fugitive, so can the words be used to refer to a great variety of human predicament. The flexibility of the term situation is allowed to include a cultural moment of poetic inspiration, the atmosphere of a political crisis, the mood of a decade, the state of a nation, a condition of exile, an artistic vogue, and the endgames of lifetimes. The degree of importance these supportive situations have in the writing and reading of poetry is brought into relief by the moments of historical and personal crisis that are explored.
Keywords:
selves,
situations,
readers,
writers,
interlocutors,
relationship,
trust,
politics,
history
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2005 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199273256 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2007 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199273256.001.0001 |
