Front cover image for Sincerity's shadow : self-consciousness in British romantic and mid-twentieth-century American poetry

Sincerity's shadow : self-consciousness in British romantic and mid-twentieth-century American poetry

"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."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2004
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2004
Geschichte 1798-2004
viii, 244 pages ; 25 cm
9780674011885, 0674011880
52644366
Introduction 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 Conclusion Notes Index