Approaching post-World War II poetry from a postmodern critical perspective, this study challenges the prevailing assumption that experimental forms signify political opposition while traditional forms are politically conservative. Such essentialist alignments of forms with extra-formal values, and the oppositional framework of innovation versus conservation that they yield, reflect modernist biases inappropriate for reading postwar poetry. Biasing defines postmodern poetry as a break with modernism's valorization of technique and its implicit collusion with technological progress. She shows that four major postwar poets - Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and James Merrill (two traditional and two experimental) - cannot be read as politically conservative because formally traditional or as culturally oppositional because formally experimental. All of these poets acknowledge that no one form is more natural than another, and no given form grants them a superior position for
Approaching post-World War II poetry from a postmodern critical perspective, this study challenges the prevailing assumption that experimental forms signify political opposition while traditional forms are politically conservative. Such essentialist alignments of forms with extra-formal values, and the oppositional framework of innovation versus conservation that they yield, reflect modernist biases inappropriate for reading postwar poetry. Biasing defines postmodern poetry as a break with modernism's valorization of technique and its implicit collusion with technological progress. She shows that four major postwar poets - Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and James Merrill (two traditional and two experimental) - cannot be read as politically conservative because formally traditional or as culturally oppositional because formally experimental. All of these poets acknowledge that no one form is more natural than another, and no given form grants them a superior position for
Lyric poetry has long been regarded as the intensely private, emotional expression of individuals, powerful precisely because it draws readers into personal worlds. But who, exactly, is the "I" in a l
Nazim Hikmet (1902–1963), Turkey’s best-loved poet and a commanding presence in its public life, lived through a turbulent era—the end of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Communist Russia, and the birt
An English-language translation of a semi-autobiographical international classic by the late World Peace Prize-winning author traces the experiences of a man who reflects on his friendships, relations
A centennial volume, with previously unavailable poems, by Turkey's greatest poet. Published in celebration of the poet's one hundredth birthday, this exciting new edition of the poems of the
Written during the Second World War while Hikmet was serving a thirteen-year sentence as a political prisoner, his verse-novel uses cinematic techniques to tell the story of the emergence of secu
