The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell

Books Abroad ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 376
Author(s):  
Robert D. Spector ◽  
Marjorie G. Perloff
Keyword(s):  
Robert Lowell

Investing the Cultural Capital of Robert Lowell

1992 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 194
Author(s):  
James Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Robert Lowell

Lyric as Comedy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Calista McRae
Keyword(s):  
Robert Lowell ◽  
John Berryman ◽  
American Poets ◽  
Insight Into

A poet walks into a bar... this book explores the unexpected comic opportunities within recent American poems about deeply personal, often embarrassing, experiences. Lyric poems, the book finds, can be surprising sites of a shifting, unruly comedy, as seen in the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, and Monica Youn. The book draws out the ways in which key American poets have struggled with persistent expectations about what expressive poetry can and should do. It reveals how the modern lyric, rather than bestowing order on the poet's thoughts and emotions, can center on impropriety and confusion, formal breakage and linguistic unruliness, and self-observation and self-staging. The close readings in the book also provide new insight into the theory and aesthetics of comedy, taking in the indirect, glancing comic affordances of poetry. In doing so, the book captures varieties of humor that do not align with traditional terms, centering abjection and pleasure as facets of contemporary lyric practice.

Interlude

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Grobe
Keyword(s):  
Robert Lowell ◽  
Pivotal Moments ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Social Privilege

As each art form turned confessional, the first artists to attempt it had unusual amounts of social privilege—e.g., among poets, Robert Lowell, a Boston Brahmin. That, perhaps, is why confessional artists have tended to be white, at least in early, pivotal moments in each art form. And yet, over and over, these white, confessional artists have adopted the voices of ethnic and racial others, credentialing their angst through appropriation. Not only is confessionalism unbearably white as a movement, but confessional artists tend to find their own whiteness unbearable. Nonwhite confessional artists, though, do something similar—e.g., in comedy, Richard Pryor—blending personal expression with persona performance, fostering identifications across identitarian boundaries.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document