The Poetry of Disturbance: The Discomforts of Postwar American Poetry (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

David Bergman
Cambridge University Press, 6/30/2015
EAN 9781107086685, ISBN10: 110708668X

Hardcover, 189 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm
Language: English

In The Poetry of Disturbance, David Bergman argues that post-war poetry underwent a significant if subtle shift in emphasis, moving from the modernist concern with the poem as a visual text to one that was chiefly oral in nature. The resulting change was disturbing, especially for those brought up on the principles of high modernism. This new stress on orality implied a shift in the economy of the poem, away from the austerity of language advocated by Pound and Eliot to a style that conveyed freedom, expansiveness, and an innovative directness.

1. Poems that disturb
2. Disturbing modernism
3. Orality and copia
4. Disturbing voices
5. A queer directness
6. The long poem.