The Given and the Made: Recent American Poets

"Based on her recent T. S. Eliot Lectures at the University of Kent, Helen Vendler's new book takes a typically perceptive look at American lyric poetry through two generations: the postwar generation represented by Robert Lowell and John Berryman, and the present generation represented by Rita Dove and Jorie Graham." "Arguing that lyric poetry is concerned above all with the inner life, Helen Vendler discusses how the work of these four poets mediates some personal 'given': Lowell's concern with history, a consequence of his famous forebears; Berryman's obsession with the Freudian myth of the Id, due to his uncontrollable manic-depressive illness and severe alcoholism; Dove's interest in representing blackness in different forms; and Graham's sense of multiple linguistic realms as a result of her trilingual education."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved