Defensive Measures

Download or read book Defensive Measures written by Lee Upton and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of our strongest poetry that learned its lessons from early modernism lives by its defensive measures, that is, by means of reversing, inverting, and challenging in covert ways a dominant perceptual mode. Defensive Measures explores strategies by which poets claim their distinctiveness, and argues that poetry is the one literary form that most insistently demands a defense. It demands a defense, it would seem, because it is perpetually in crisis - not only in regard to its utility and its aesthetic appeal (or the vigor of its renunciation of such an appeal), but in regard to its generic existence. Upton defines a generative conception of defense and examines in a new light the poetry of Lorine Niedecker, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Gluck, and Anne Carson. In writing about Bishop. Upton puts this well-regarded poet in a new framework, aligning her work with that of three poets whose aesthetics might be viewed as antithetical to her own ...