"A brilliant, philosophical, and aesthetic approach to twentieth-century poetry that casts important light on the great poetic works of René Char and George Oppen. Revealing the ongoing role of wonder in the post-Romantic tradition, it points to two remarkable poets whose work embodies imagination in the knowledge of inevitable loss, renewal in the awareness of despair. This is a book worth reading for its insight into two poets and the larger literary and philosophical currents in which they lived and worked." —Sandra L. Bermann, Princeton University
"Robert Baker has written a fine and unusual book: a study of two remarkable poets, one French and the other American, and a concluding reflection of considerable literary and intellectual reach on the gap between history and metaphysics in which both poets found themselves and in which we still subsist. Baker's style is synthetic, magisterial, drawing on a capacious knowledge of literature and the history of ideas." —Kevin Hart, University of Virginia
"This is an erudite, beautifully written, and compelling book, one that makes an important contribution to our understanding not only of the two poets on whom it focuses but of the period they inhabit and that we, as their inheritors, continue to inhabit. Robert Baker wears his considerable learning lightly, but he has deep knowledge both of the history of European and American poetry and of the history of philosophy. He has thought deeply and passionately about poetry, philosophy, history, and the ways in which they intertwine." —Henry Weinfield, University of Notre Dame
“. . . Baker shows readers that each poet, especially as he grew older, participated in that larger philosophical search for an account of the mystery of the whole in which individual lives unfold: Where am I? Who am I? How should I live my life? In the modern West, these questions have been answered from a political, historicist, or sociological perspective and from a Romantic, phenomenological, or existentialist perspective, and both Oppen and Char wrestled with the tension between those perspectives.” —Choice
“Baker has written a comprehensive study of how modernist European and American poetry continues to internalize philosophical oppositions by looking beyond the discrete outputs of the two poets it names in its title. In this sense, it will be of equal interest to anyone concerned with Char’s oeuvre, Oppen’s work, or with the intellectual history of Western religion, philosophy, and art in the twentieth century.” —Modern Language Review
“ . . . I have hardly ever come across a book that was more packed with insight into the vital and contentious topic of the relevance of poetry to political and social life.” —Heythrop Journal
. . . Baker shows readers that each poet, especially as he grew older, participated in that larger philosophical search for an account of the mystery of the whole in which individual lives unfold: Where am I? Who am I? How should I live my life? In the modern West, these questions have been answered from a political, historicist, or sociological perspective and from a Romantic, phenomenological, or existentialist perspective, and both Oppen and Char wrestled with the tension between those perspectives.
Baker has written a comprehensive study of how modernist European and American poetry continues to internalize philosophical oppositions by looking beyond the discrete outputs of the two poets it names in its title. In this sense, it will be of equal interest to anyone concerned with Char’s oeuvre, Oppen’s work, or with the intellectual history of Western religion, philosophy, and art in the twentieth century.”
. . . I have hardly ever come across a book that was more packed with insight into the vital and contentious topic of the relevance of poetry to political and social life.”
This is a brilliant, erudite, beautifully written, and compelling book, one that makes an important contribution to our understanding not only of the two poets on whom it focuses but of the period they inhabit and that we, as their inheritors, continue to inhabit. Robert Baker wears his considerable learning lightly, but he has deep knowledge both of the history of European and American poetry and of the history of philosophy. He has thought deeply and passionately about poetry, philosophy, history, and the ways in which they intertwine.”
A brilliant, philosophical, and aesthetic approach to twentieth-century poetry that casts important light on the great poetic works of René Char and George Oppen. Revealing the ongoing role of wonder in the post-Romantic tradition, it points to two remarkable poets whose work embodies imagination in the knowledge of inevitable loss, renewal in the awareness of despair. This is a book worth reading for its insight into two poets and the larger literary and philosophical currents in which they lived and worked.
Robert Baker has written a fine and unusual book: a study of two remarkable poets, one French and the other American, and a concluding reflection of considerable literary and intellectual reach on the gap between history and metaphysics in which both poets found themselves and in which we still subsist. Baker’s style is synthetic, magisterial, drawing on a capacious knowledge of literature and the history of ideas.
