The poetry of Susan Howe History, theology, authority /

This book is a comprehensive guide to Susan Howe's major work and addresses such key themes as poetic form, history, and authority.

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Montgomery, William.
Published:
Literature type: Electronic Software eBook
Language: English
Series: Modern and contemporary poetry and poetics
Subjects:
Online Access: http://www.palgraveconnect.com/doifinder/10.1057/9780230113091
Summary: This book is a comprehensive guide to Susan Howe's major work and addresses such key themes as poetic form, history, and authority.
"Most readings of Susan Howe's poetry to date have been insider views: they account for Howe's themes, images, and structures by lining these up with her own stated views and purposes. Will Montgomery's may thus be the first to read Howe's oeuvre critically, to examine what he sees as the unresolved but productive tension in Howe's work 'between a poetry of redress and a poetry of grace.' To call Howe's writing (whether 'poetry' or 'prose') 'anti-authoritarian' or 'anti-canonical,' for example, is to downplay its complexity and contradiction: hers is an oeuvre that 'returns poetic language back to a founding and incoercible strangeness.' Refusing to classify this dazzling and indispensable writer as a 'language poet,' 'feminist poet,' or 'pragmatist,' Montgomery gives us a highly original reading of Howe's work that is also a study of the larger issues now confronting poetry and poetics." - Marjorie Perloff, Professor of English Emerita, Stanford University and author of Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century "This lucid study of the full span of Susan Howe's poetry draws on impressive, scholarly research into her letters, essays, poetry, and performances to reveal in compelling detail just how much she has embedded her poetry in a poetic tradition stretching back beyond Wallace Stevens to the Elizabethans, as well as engaging with her avant-garde contemporaries. Will Montgomery is a subtle, perceptive, and knowledgeable guide through the forests of allusion, and to the barriers to interpretation, as he traces Howe's interests in gender and genealogy, the sacred, histories of authority, lyric modes of subjectivity, and the powers of language. The result is a judicious affirmation of the scope and richness of Susan Howe's work that sends one back to the poems with new insight. The Poetry of Susan Howe is indispensable for anyone interested in recent developments in the modernist poetic tradition." - Peter Middleton, Professor of English, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Southampton and author of Distant Reading.
Item Description: Electronic book text.
Epublication based on: 9780230621978, 2010.
Carrier Form: 246 p.
ISBN: 9780230621978
9780230113091 :
0230113095 :
CLC: I712.25
Contents: Introduction * The Maternal Disinheritance * The Ghost of the Father * Susan Howe's Renaissance * The Poetics of American Space * Enthusiasm, Telepathy, and Immediacy * The Late Lyric.