Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry
The Contemporaneity of Modernism

Charles Altieri's book sets modernist American poetry in a precise cultural context.

Charles Altieri (Author)

9780521330855, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 January 1990

538 pages
23.4 x 15.2 x 3 cm, 0.92 kg

"Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry is full of valuable insights and analyses." American Literature

Charles Altieri's book sets modernist American poetry in a precise cultural context by analysing how major poets reacted to the challenge posed by modernist painting's radical critique of traditional representational models for art. It argues that modernist poets have tended to resist the received values of their contemporary culture by finding idealising principles in modes of pure abstraction. It traces the use of such abstraction in literature from Wordsworth, through Baudelaire and Mallarme, to T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein. There are summary chapters also on Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound, considerations of Cezanne and the Cubists, and a substantial theoretical discussion of the nature of abstract art.

1. It must be abstract
2. Self-subsuming artifacts: the logic of constructivist abstraction
3. Knowledge enormous denies the god in me: abstraction and the Romantic tradition
4. Modernist irony and the Kantian heritage
5. Eliot's Symbolists subject as end and beginning
6. 'The abstraction of the artist': three painterly models for the constructivist will
7. Modes of abstraction in Modernist poetry
8. Modernist abstraction and Pound's first Cantos: the ethos for a new Renaissance
9. Why Stevens must be abstract
10. Afterword: the end(s) of Modernism.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]