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.
- ISBN10 0674462769
- ISBN13 9780674462762
- Publish Date 13 April 1984
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Harvard University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 224
- Language English