In this bold defense of so-called confessional poetry, Man 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.
Williamson discusses some problems involved in self-analytic poetry—the ambiguous question of universality, the difficulties of objectifying one’s own personality, and the perhaps greater difficulties of attempting a poetry that is inward but not personal. He takes up the poets individually, characterizing their work and its development and offering balanced, considered judgments on particular poems. Displaying a remarkable grasp of American postwar culture, he places the poetry within the broad setting of contemporary events and dominant national sentiments.
The problematic modern self is a much discussed topic. This is the first book to use it as a lens for examining contemporary poetry, and it proves a powerful lens indeed.
* Introduction *"I Am That I Am": The Ethics and Aesthetics of Personal
Poetry * Real and Numinous Selves: A Reading of Plath * Language Against
Itself: The Middle Generation of Contemporary Poets *"Surrealism" and the
Absent Self * The Diffracting Diamond: Ashbery, Romanticism, and Anti-Art *
The Future of Personal Poetry * Notes * Credits * Index
Alan Williamson, Professor of English, University of California, Davis, is a poet whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, New Republic, Partisan Review and other publications; a collection of his poems, Presence was recently published. He is also the author of Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell.
