Product Description
Cognitive Poetic Readings in Elizabeth Bishop is the first full-length cognitive poetic study of a single author and her composition process. It turns to cognitive linguistics in interpreting the poet's alternate construals - poetic conceptualizations recorded in manuscript material. The book demonstrates how our awareness of such universal structures of invention as categorization, image schemas, metaphor, conceptual integration, metonymy, idealized cognitive models, licensing stories (presented in Part One) can assist us in deducing the original movement of writing during genetic analysis or in arriving at a reading of the poem's published version.Within the framework of cognitive poetics, grounded as it is in a systematic study of the human mind, we can appreciate the American poet's conceptual universe structured by the pattern MENTAL LIFE/POETIC CREATIVITY IS AN EXPLORATION OF A VISUAL FIELD. This pattern embraces, as well as influences, Bishop's elaborating and questioning of the conventional metaphor MIND IS A BODY MOVING IN SPACE, which lies at the centre of her poetics. Her career-long commitment to dramatize the mind in action - ""to portray, not a thought, but a mind thinking"" - is sampled and examined in Part Two, which conducts detailed analyses of eight poems, including drafts, typescripts, notes, journal entries, sketches, letters: Elizabeth Bishop's avant-textes. Here the genetic search for the cognizing mind engaged in composition complements the cognitive research into meaning construction, and, conversely, cognitive poetics assists genetic criticism in portraying a mind thinking in the process of writing.Cognitive Poetic Readings in Elizabeth Bishop portrays also a mind reading, as it investigates Bishop scholarship to show how cognitive poetics can justify the critical intuitions of Bishop scholars and guide us in ... Read more

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Many readers are struck by Elizabeth Bishop's use of clear, striking descriptions of the physical world, and no scholar has ever asked how Bishop's commitment to description shapes her writing and thinking. "Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Description" argues that attention to the material realm informs everything Bishop does. Seen through this lens, many familiar topics look remarkably different. Bishop's relationship to travel, epiphany, surrealism, and imagery are all transformed, and a timely new Bishop emerges - one quite different from the postmodern poet that has dominated recent scholarship. Zachariah Pickard eschews academic jargon and concentrates on the poems themselves as well as a number of key prose passages that have long been overlooked. His study combines scholarly rigor with clarity and common sense to present a moving new account of Bishop's work that will appeal to educated readers within and without the academy. ... Read more

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Exploring the connections between nature and culture, this volume discusses the works of three female American poets: Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), and Amy Clampitt (1920-1994).

Though only Bradstreet was born outside North America, each poet is shown to grapple with the ways that European civilization was transformed on the new continent. The author's analysis highlights the interconnected themes of travel, geography, cartography and wildness. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Opening the Doors of Perception
This book is an outstanding analysis of "reading and writing nature" in the works of four great American poets.I found the book specific and compelling. It helped clarify for me the problems of perception and cognition as they have been analyzed, written about and lived by American poets.It enhanced my own experience of and appreciation for these writers.The book also opens a door onto the larger dimensions of nature that can become locked or occluded through disuse. I recommend this book for anyone who is interested in the relationship between art, nature and the imagination. ... Read more

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Just as the cultural background of readers shapes how they respond to texts, the context in which writers live shapes what they write. This book explores the relationship between three prominent twentieth-century American white women poets and the manifestations of whiteness in their works. The book argues that white women who write do so from within ideological, social, economic, political, and psychological frameworks of whiteness. Each chapter places one poet in relation to historical and cultural racial events prevalent during the time of her writings and explores the particular poems created and published during that period. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An Illuminating and Surprising Study
Renée Curry's White Women Writing White is an admirably well researched,independent, brave, and often brilliant and startling book. It willundoubtedly prove germinal (and controversial) in critical whitenessstudies. It provides an absolutely new perspective on the poets HildaDoolittle (H. D.), Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. It draws attention,truly for the first time, to the racial signifiers in the texts of thesethree great poets. It treats whiteness as a marked characteristic in thesame way as blackness and Asianness have traditionally functioned inmainstream American literature and culture. It repeatedly and convincinglylocates racial meanings in passages that have never been read in that lightbefore. This book transforms the landscape. It is the most significant newwork on these poets in years. ... Read more

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This book examines the response of twentieth-century American poetry to the proliferation of technical and visual media. It treats the modern poet's problem of how to accommodate a cultural focus on photo-realism and technologically enhanced vision in a verbal aesthetic medium that itself generates no actual images. Relying on references to material media in the poets' correspondence and biographies, as well as on tropes and visual semiotics in the poems, the project explores the paradoxical sensation of reality effects in language. ... Read more

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Between 1950 and 1979, May Swenson and Elizabeth Bishop exchanged over 260 letters.These letters have interested scholars of American poetry for the commentary they contain on important work that each poet was publishing at the time, but equally for what these letters reveal about the relationship between the two writers. In Dear Elizabeth, three letters and five poems from Swenson to Bishop, including an unfinished draft never published before, are gathered into one small volume with an insightful essay by scholar and poet Kirstin Hotelling Zona. ... Read more

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Becoming a Poet traces the evolution of Elizabeth Bishop's poetic career through her friendships with other poets, notably Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Published in 1989 following critic David Kalstone's death, with the help of a number of his friends and colleagues, it was greeted with uniformly enthusiastic praise. Hailed at that time as "one of the most sensitive appreciations of Elizabeth Bishop's genius ever composed" and "a first-rate piece of criticism" and "a masterpiece of understanding about friendship and about poetry," it has been largely unavailable in recent years.
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"One of the most promising young poet-critics in America" (Los Angeles Times) examines a revolutionary generation of poets.

Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz formed one of the great constellations of talent in American literature. In the decades after World War II, they changed American poetry forever by putting themselves at risk in their poems in a new and provocative way. Their daring work helped to inspire the popular style of poetry now known as "confessional." But partly as a result of their openness, they have become better known for their tumultuous lives—afflicted by mental illness, alcoholism, and suicide—than for their work. This book reclaims their achievement by offering critical "biographies of the poetry"—tracing the development of each poet's work, exploring their major themes and techniques, and examining how they transformed life into art.

An ideal introduction for readers coming to these major American poets for the first time, it will also help veteran readers to appreciate their work in a new light. 6 illustrations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

The Surgeon's Gift: Inspiration and Clarity
Adam Kirsch takes his title "The Wounded Surgeon" from T. S. Eliot's poem "East Coker":

"The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part."

In his introduction, Kirsch explains: "T.S. image evokes the resolve, not to say heroism, that these poets displayed by submitting their most intimate and painful experiences to the objective discipline of art. . . . But the suffering that afflicted this group of poets becomes significant only because they examined it with the surgeon's rigor, detachment, and skill" (p. xi).

Kirsch does the same--examines with "rigor, detachment and skill"--the body of these six poets' lives and works. His close readings deepen our understanding of how their lives and work intertwined, influenced, and yes, (as the subtitle says) transformed each other.

Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, Jarrell, Schwartz, and Plath never had a better reader--certainly not in one place. Each chapter illumines the other as Kirsch patiently explores his thesis and shows the rise and (and in the case of Schwartz) the fall of their talents.

Kirch shows their education and work in the context of the literary movements of the time--modernism and The New Criticism. These six poets scrambled a path through Moderism to a new form of poetic expression that would stamp itself on generations of poets to come. This new way of writing allowed the breath and messiness of life to come inside the poem, not be held aloof and at bay outside.

Personally, I especially enjoyed his chapter on Elizabeth Bishop ("Everything only connected by 'and'and 'and'") as Kirch elucidates Bishop's search to "contain loss in art, the scream in the clang." I came away with a profound appreciation of Bishop ascraftsperson (maker), poet, person, and woman...and, can now take these insights back to reading her work.

I also found inspiration and greater clarity for my own work from reading this book. What greater gift can a writer ask?

--Janet Grace Riehl,Sightlines: A Poet's Diary

This Derivative Book is Less than Groundbreaking
Anyone who has read the scholarship on these poets knows that there is really nothing original here.Either Kirsch has not done his homework, or, more likely, he has assimilated much of the relevant schoalrship without acknowedging it in this sparsely documented book.I was excited about this book because I thought it would bea good introduction to some good poets for the general reader.It may well be I'm not the audience for this book, but I noticed that most of the insights had been expressed before by others and more convincingly.This is middle-of-the-road, indeed middling, literary journalism.Kirsch's claims are modest, but he is not--he reinvents the wheel and passes it off as his own singular wisdom at his best and as the wisdom of the ages at his worst.

Not a poet or critic
I have little to no experience with poetry criticism and little appreciation for modern poetry. I was hoping this book would provide me with some education so I could appreciate poetry to a greater extent. Well, it did that and more. I found the book very interesting. Although a "dense" read (I read many sections more than once to understand them), I found it worth my time. I came away with an understanding of these poets and how to read their, and others', poetry. I found the analyses to be straightforward and not full of a lot of insider jargon. Although I have no sense of how much the author's comments are revisionist, repetitive of prior work, or new; I found them to be well-substantiated and supported by some wonderful examples of poems.

Poetic Purging
Adam Kirsch has written an interesting 'surgical procedure' in the THE WOUNDED SURGEON: he defends the so-called 'Confessional Poets' Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz whose work from 1940 through the 1970s, praising "the resolve, not to say heroism, that these poets displayed by submitting their most intimate and painful experiences to the objective discipline of art."

In clear and at all times illuminating prose Kirsch examines each of these six poets and relates the personal lives that influenced their major works.Not a gossip column this, but an erudite exploration of how pain and death and disappointment and tragedy of all manner drove these poets to validate their own sorrows and rage rather that imagining those feelings or assigning them to fictitious personages.

While most everyone knows the life and times and resulting poetry of Sylvia Plath (endless biographies and films have seen to that), few of the others' lives are understood. Kirsch sets the record straight and in doing so makes lucid some of the more obtuse works included in this book.

Some would argue that Kirsch's thesis goes on too long, but in getting into the minds and hearts of poets can be a lengthy process. Kirsch has done a fine job of study on these six poets and lets us see how their art transformed their lives by their confessional poetry. Grady Harp, June 05 ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Interesting background on a minor writer
John Peale Bishop was a minor poet and author of the 1920s and 1930s.He knew Fitzgerald and met Hemingway, but didn't make that much of an impact himself.This biography gives you a view of the world of the time and some sense of what it was like to live then and try to make a living by writing.

The real interest for me is that John Bishop was my grandfather.I was named after him.Since he died young, I never met him.There weren't many family stories, either.This book thus has a special value to me that it probably won't to others.
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Product Description
Imperialism on Trial reveals, across a broad cross-section of geographical and political settings, the operation of the complicated and often conflicted dynamic between the national and international dimensions of colonialism in its final and most historically consequential phase. ... Read more