Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism

by Charles Altieri

Overview

Charles Altieri's groundbreaking new book sets modernist American poetry in a precise cultural context by analyzing how major poets reacted to the challenge posed by modernist painting's radical critique of traditional representational models for art. It argues that modernist poets have tended to resist the received values of their contemporary culture by finding idealizing principles in modes of pure abstraction. It traces the use of such abstraction in literature from Wordsworth, through Baudelaire and Mallarmé, to T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein. There are summary chapters also on Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound, considerations of Cézanne and the Cubists, and a substantial theoretical discussion of the nature of abstract art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521330855
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/26/1990
Series:	Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture , #37
Pages:	538
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.18(d)

About the Author

Charles Altieri is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (1984), Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals (1990), and Subjective Agency (1994).

Table of Contents

1. It must be abstract; 2. Self-subsuming artifacts: the logic of constructivist abstraction; 3. Knowledge enormous denies the god in me: abstraction and the Romantic tradition; 4. Modernist irony and the Kantian heritage; 5. Eliot's Symbolists subject as end and beginning; 6. 'The abstraction of the artist': three painterly models for the constructivist will; 7. Modes of abstraction in Modernist poetry; 8. Modernist abstraction and Pound's first Cantos: the ethos for a new Renaissance; 9. Why Stevens must be abstract; 10. Afterword: the end(s) of Modernism.

Editorial Reviews

"Finally a much-needed volume on the interrelations between modernist poetry and modernist art in the United States!...A major contribution to the study of the sister arts." Virginia Quarterly

"Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry is full of valuable insights and analyses." American Literature

From the Publisher