Although many books deal individually with each of the major writers treated in "Poets of Reality," none attempts through analyses of these particular men and their works, to identify the new directions taken by twentieth-century literature. J. Hillis Miller, challenging the assumption that modern poetry is merely the extension of an earlier romanticism, presents critical studies of the six central figures Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams who played key roles in evolving a poetry in which reality comes to be present to the senses, and present in the words of the poem which ratify this possession.
A new kind of poetry has appeared in the twentieth century, the author claims, a poetry which, growing out of romanticism and symbolism, goes far beyond it. The old generalizations about the nature and use of poetry are no longer applicable, and it is the gradual emergence of new forms, culminating in the work of Williams, that Miller traces and defines."
- ISBN10 0674680502
- ISBN13 9780674680500
- Publish Date 1 January 1965
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 2 March 2016
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Harvard University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 386
- Language English