by Alan Williamson
Harvard University Press, 1984
Cloth: 978-0-674-46276-2
Library of Congress Classification PS310.S34W54 1984
Dewey Decimal Classification 811.5409353

ABOUT THIS BOOK
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In this bold defense of so-called confessional poetry, Alan Williamson shows us that much of the best writing of the past twenty-five years is about the sense of being or having a self, a knowable personal identity. The difficulties posed by this subject help explain the fertility of contemporary poetic experiment—from the jaggedness of the later work of Robert Lowell to the montage—like methods of John Ashbery, from the visual surrealism of James Wright and W. S. Merwin to the radical plainness of Frank Bidart. Williamson examines these and other poets from a psychological perspective, giving an especially striking reading of Sylvia Plath.