A Coherent Splendor
A Coherent Splendor
In this book Albert Gelpi traces the emergence of American Modernist poetry as a reaction to, and outgrowth of, the Romantic ideology of the nineteenth century. He focuses on the remarkable generation of poets who came to maturity in the years of the First World War and whose works constitute the principal body of poetic Modernism in English. Gelpi argues that the essential dialectic in Modernism extends and reconstitutes issues central to Romanticism. This is expressed in the interaction between two important strains in Modernism: the Symbolist exemplified in Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Allan Tate, and Hart Crane; and the Imagist, exemplified in Ezra Pound, H. D. and William Carlos Williams.
Reviews & endorsements
"The most vigorous, most consistently interesting study we have of twentieth-century American poetry in its relation to its Romantic precursors. Albert Gelpi's book is a powerful revisionist history of Modernism...[His] breadth and range are remarkable." Marjorie Perloff
"A Coherent Splendor has the makings of a standard; its breadth and reach make it a welcome new addition to the discussion on modernism." The New England Quarterly
"A Coherent Splendor is a book which no student or teacher of American literature would want to overlook. Its richness and insight make each of the separate sections valuable, able to stand alone as an introduction to the poet covered. As John Dryden said fo Geoffrey Chaucer in his oft-quoted remark, `Here is God's plenty.'" Leon Lewis, Macgill's Literary Annual
"A Coherent Splendor has the makings of a standard; its breadth and reach make it a welcome new addition to the discussion on modernism." Suzanne Matson, Boston College, in The New England Quarterly
Product details
January 1988Hardback
9780521345330
496 pages
228 × 152 × 34 mm
0.88kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction: the Janus-face of Romanticism and Modernism
- 1. Robert Frost and John Crowe Ransom: Diptych of Ironists, the Woodsman and the Chevalier
- 2. Wallace Stevens: World as Mundo, Mundo as world
- 3. T. S. Eliot: The lady between the yew trees
- 4. Ezra Pound: Between Kung and Eleusis
- 5. H. D.: Helen in Bethlehem, Hilda in Egypt
- 6. William Carlos Williams: Mother-Son and Paterson
- 7. Allen Tate and Hart Crane: Diptych with Demons and Angels Coda
- Yvor Winters and Robinson Jeffers: The Janus-face of anti-modernism.
