|
by: Langdon Hammer
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.5209
EAN: 9780691068770
ISBN: 0691068771
Label: Princeton University Press
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 300
Publication Date: June 01, 1993
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Sales Rank: 1939463
Studio: Princeton University Press
Editorial Review:
Book Description:
Focusing on the vexed friendship between Hart Crane and Allen Tate, this book examines twentieth-century American poetry's progress toward institutional sanction and professional organization, a process in which sexual identities, poetic traditions, and literary occupations were in question and at stake. Langdon Hammer combines biography and formalist analysis to argue that American modernism was a Janus-faced phenomenon, at once emancipatory and elitist, which simultaneously attacked traditional cultural authority and reconstructed it in new forms. Hammer shows how Crane and Tate, working in relation to each other and to T. S. Eliot, created for themselves the competing roles of 'genius' and 'poet-critic.' Crane embraced the self-authorizing powers of the individual talent at the cost of standing outside the emerging consensus of high modernist literary culture, an aesthetic isolation which converged with his social isolation as a gay man. Tate, turning against Crane, linked the modernist defense of tradition to an embattled heterosexual masculinity, while he adapted Eliot's stance to a career sustained by criticism and teaching. Ending his book with a discussion of Robert Lowell's career, Hammer maintains that Lowell's 'confessional' poetry recapitulates the conflict enacted by Crane and Tate.
|
