The Tenth Muse
The Psyche of the American Poet

The Tenth Muse considers the debate between intellect and passion apparent in the work of poets from Bradstreet to Rich.

Albert Gelpi (Author)

9780521413398, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 October 1991

358 pages, 14 b/w illus. 4 maps
24.4 x 16.1 x 2.5 cm, 0.68 kg

"Albert Gelpi's The Tenth Muse, has given us a strong, suggestive, and revealing book, exquisitely successful in the balance it offers of specific example, modest statement, and guarded psychological interpretation, on the one hand, and on the other hand, broad social history." Robert Coles, Studies in Romanticism

The Tenth Muse was enormously well-received when first published by Harvard University Press in 1975, and has been deemed a classic work. It was out of print for several years and then re- issued by Cambrirdge in this 1992 edition. In it Albert Gelpi asks hard questions about how poetry can take on for itself the problems of shaping American identities and argues that the conditions of American life and culture have pushed our major poets into a debate between intellect and passion. Gelpi provides thorough readings of major American poets from Bradstreet and Taylor up to the modernists, often using contemporary poets (Rich, Ginsberg, Duncan) as frames for those predecessors.

Preface
The muse as psyche, the psyche as muse
1. The American as artist, the artist as American
2. Edward Taylor: types and tropes
3. Ralph Waldo Emerson: the eye of the seer
4. Edgar Allan Poe: the hand of the maker
5. Walt Whitman: the self as circumference
6. Emily Dickinson: the self as center
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC]