The Fate of American Poetry - Softcover

Holden, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082031398X ISBN 13: 9780820313986

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 1992

Synopsis

Are we witnessing the death of American poetry? Many critics have charged as much, pointing to a poetry that is increasingly marginal, specialized and cloistered. Challenging such doomsayers, Jonathan Holden offers a hopeful appraisal of the current state of American poetry, and he suggests several avenues American poets might take to attract the kind of reader who, on a plane trip from New York City to Los Angeles, would probably sooner read a novel than a book of poems. Examining the reasons behind the loss of readership and diminished status of poetry in America, Holden blames the advent of modernism and the institutionalization of the modernist tradition in university English departments. This tradition, he says, "is still preserved by specialist custodians in the service of a narrow subject matter and a correspondingly narrow decorum". Although in many ways the American university's overwhelming support of poetry has left the art more vigorous than ever, it has also encouraged the mass production of mediocre verse. Holden contends that the best postwar American poets have shed the elitist vestiges of modernism and have enlarged both the capabilities of poetry and its appeal to a general audience by incorporating subject matter formerly confined to other genres. In discussing contemporary poems by William Stafford, Sharon Olds, Scott Cairns, C.K. Williams, Sydney Lea and Philip Levine, among others, Holden illustrates how American poetry, by including a more diverse subject matter, can assert some just claim to a wider audience - a literate audience of non-specalists.

About this title

Review:

"Holden is the first critic I've read in a long time who so ambitiously maps out promising fields for poets to labor in."--X. J. Kennedy

"Brilliant, careful, and necessary."--Bruce Weigl

Holden is the first critic I've read in a long time who so ambitiously maps out promising fields for poets to labor in.--X. J. Kennedy

Brilliant, careful, and necessary.--Bruce Weigl

About the Author:

Jonathan Holden is Distinguished University Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Kansas State University. In 2005 he was appointed as the first Poet Laureate of Kansas. Holden's many books include the memoir "Mama's Boys: A Double Life," the poetry collection "Knowing: New and Selected Poems," and the critical study "The Old Formalism: Character in Contemporary American Poetry."

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 082031398X
• ISBN 13: 9780820313986
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176