American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms

by Mutlu Konuk Blasing

This important study of major nineteenth - and twentieth - century American poets redefines poetic tradition in America. Mutlu Konuk Blasing argues against the prevailing view that Emerson stands alone at the head of a single line of succession. She shows, rather, that four nineteenth-century poets----Poe, Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson---each established an American poetic tradition.

248 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1987

Reviews

[Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of the best books about poetry I've read in a long time. It helped me think about how a poet's formal choices reflect fundamental ideas about what exists, how we communicate meaning, and poetry's purpose. It was slow to read because of Blasing's dense, precise use of abstract terms; however, it was worth it because I'll be thinking about its questions for years.

She focuses on twelve poets, categorized by their principal mode of communication: the allegoricals, Poe, Eliot, and Plath; the analogicals, Emerson, Stevens, and Bishop; the anagogicals, Whitman, Pound, and O'Hara; and the ironicals, Dickinson, Crane, and Ashbery. She uses excerpts from their critical writing, journals and letters, and poems to show how these poets can be classified substantively, instead of relying on surface-level shared style qualities or grouping them by time period. She arranges them by the substance of their rhetoric: whether they tend to allegory (poem-things are emblems for world-things) analogy (poem-things proportionally represent world-things) or other rhetorical means. By exposing their ideas about the limits of language, the function of form, and the relation of poetry to reality, Blasing gives us a great gift by allowing us to think among giants: it was like having the opportunity to attend a salon with Plath, Stevens, Whitman, and Crane where they read excerpts from their poems and afterward talk about how poetry works.