Download Lucifer in harness; American meter, metaphor, and diction by Edwin S. Fussell PDF

By Edwin S. Fussell

For approximately 200 years the rebellious American poet has been reluctantly harnessed to the English language and literary culture. In a triptych of essays, Edwin Fussell makes an attempt "to discover the basic limitation of yank poetry because it seems to be within the 3 the most important fields of meter, metaphor, and poetic diction, the 3 an important fields of yank poetry (taken as a complete) such a lot studiously refrained from through American students, yet now not, as I intend to teach, through American poets."

Writing in a provocative serious type attuned to the poets he discusses, Edwin Fussell explores the predicament of the yankee poet who desires to write a pretty "American" poetry yet needs to achieve this in a language imbued with the sensibility of English poetry and tradition. simply because those are varied from and infrequently antithetical to American cultural beliefs and commitments, the harness chafes. The emphasis is on these poets who've effectively created a very American poetry--Poe, Whitman, Pound, Eliot, and Williams--but the writer additionally discusses Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Emerson, Bryant, Lowell, and Frost, between others.

Originally released in 1973.

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Extra resources for Lucifer in harness; American meter, metaphor, and diction

Sample text

16 The Radical Tradition in American Poetry The atmosphere is not a perfume . . it has no taste of the distillation . . it is odorless, It is for my mouth forever . . I am in love with it, I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me. Some of this can be analyzed by conventional English scansion. The first triplet, for example, is basically iambic, with fines of three, then four, and then (the sum of three and four) seven feet.

The [poetic] fine must, as a minimum, have a well-conceived form within which modification may exist" (letter to Kay Boyle, [1932]). "Whitman was never able fully to realize the significance of bis structural innovations. . Selection, structural selection was lacking" ("Against the Weather," 1939). "Whitman to me was an instrument, one thing: he started us on the course of our researches 22 The Radical Tradition in American Poetry into the nature of the line by breaking finally with English prosody.

Whitman, great as he was in his instinctive drive, was also the cause of our going astray. I among the rest have much to answer for. No verse can be free, it must be governed by some measure, but not by the old measure. There Whitman was right but there, at the same time, his leadership failed him. The time was not ready for it" ("On Measure—Statement for Cid Corman," 1954). And so the battle rages. "I must make the new meter out of whole cloth," WiUiams wrote Robert LoweU on 11 March 1952.

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