Research Catalog

Title

Sincerity's shadow : self-consciousness in British Romantic and mid-twentieth-century American poetry / Deborah Forbes.

Author

Forbes, Deborah

Publication

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2004.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

viii, 244 p.; 25 cm.

Summary

"In essays comparing poets as seemingly different in context and temperament as Wordsworth and Adrienne Rich, Lord Byron and Anne Sexton, John Keats and Elizabeth Bishop, Forbes reveals unexpected convergences of poetic strategy. A lively and convincing dialectic is sustained through detailed readings of individual poems. By preserving the possible claims of sincerity longer than postmodern criticism has tended to, while understanding sincerity in the strictest sense possible, Forbes establishes a new vantage on the purposes of poetry."--BOOK JACKET.

Subjects

• English poetry > 19th century > History and criticism
• Postmodernism (Literature) > United States
• Self-consciousness (Awareness) in literature
• American poetry > 20th century > History and criticism
• Romanticism > Great Britain
• Self in literature
• Sincerity in literature

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [195]-239) and index.

Contents

1. The Personal Universal: Sincerity as Integrity in the Poetry of Wordsworth and Rich -- 2. Before and After: Sincerity as Form in the Poetry of Wordsworth, Lowell, Rich, and Plath -- 3. Sincerity and the Staged Confession: The Monologues of Browning, Eliot, Berryman, and Plath -- 4. The Drama of Breakdown and the Breakdown of Drama: The Charismatic Poetry of Byron and Sexton -- 5. Agnostic Sincerity: The Poet as Observer in the Work of Keats, Bishop, and Merrill.

ISBN

0674011880 (alk. paper)

LCCN

2003056671

OCLC

• ocm52644366
• SCSB-4861214

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries