"The university has been known for the excellence of its teaching . . .; its immense influence on American Catholic education and the intensity and liveliness of its intramural theological debates, reflecting the stresses of the modern world on the church. This informative history, by an emeritus professor of sociology, traces the university's development, omitting no controversy of relevance to current issues."--Washington Post Book World
Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell maintained lifelong, well-documented friendships with one another, often discussing each other’s work in private correspondence and published reviews. Joan Romano Shifflett’s Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell: Collaboration in the Reshaping of American Poetry traces the artistic and personal connections between the three writers. Her study uncovers the significance of their parallel literary development and reevaluates dominant views of how American poetry evolved during the mid-twentieth century. Familiar accounts of literary history, most prominently the celebration of Lowell’s Life Studies as a revolutionary breakthrough into confessional poetry, have obscured the significance of the deep connections that Lowell shared with Warren and Jarrell. They all became quite close in the 1930s, with the content and style of their early poetry revealing the impact of their mentors John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, whose aesthetics the three would ultimately modify and transform. The three poets achieved professional maturity and success in the 1940s, during which time they relied on one another’s honest critiques as they experimented with changes in subject matter and modes of expression. Shifflett shows that their works of the late 1940s were heavily influenced by Robert Frost. This period found Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell infusing ostensibly simple verse with multifaceted layers of meaning, capturing the language of speech in diction and rhythm, and striving to raise human experience to a universal level. During the 1950s, the three poets became public figures, producing major works that addressed the nation’s postwar need to reconnect with humanity. Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell continued to respond in interlocking ways throughout the 1960s, with each writer using innovative stylistic techniques to create a colloquy with readers that directed attention away from superficial matters and toward the important work of self-reflection. Drawing from biographical materials and correspondence, along with detailed readings of many poems, Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell offers a compelling new perspective on the shaping of twentieth-century American poetry.
Poetic Song Verse: Blues-Based Popular Music and Poetry invokes and critiques the relationship between blues-based popular music and poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume is anchored in music from the 1960s, when a concentration of artists transformed modes of popular music from entertainment to art-that-entertains. Musician Mike Mattison and literary historian Ernest Suarez synthesize a wide range of writing about blues and rock—biographies, histories, articles in popular magazines, personal reminiscences, and a selective smattering of academic studies—to examine the development of a relatively new literary genre dubbed by the authors as “poetic song verse.” They argue that poetic song verse was nurtured in the fifties and early sixties by the blues and in Beat coffee houses, and matured in the mid-to-late sixties in the art of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Gil Scott-Heron, Van Morrison, and others who used voice, instrumentation, arrangement, and production to foreground semantically textured, often allusive, and evocative lyrics that resembled and engaged poetry. Among the questions asked in Poetic Song Verse are: What, exactly, is this new genre? What were its origins? And how has it developed? How do we study and assess it? To answer these questions, Mattison and Suarez engage in an extended discussion of the roots of the relationship between blues-based music and poetry and address how it developed into a distinct literary genre. Unlocking the combination of richly textured lyrics wedded to recorded music reveals a dynamism at the core of poetic song verse that can often go unrealized in what often has been considered merely popular entertainment. This volume balances historical details and analysis of particular songs with accessibility to create a lively, intelligent, and cohesive narrative that provides scholars, teachers, students, music influencers, and devoted fans with an overarching perspective on the poetic power and blues roots of this new literary genre.
Epic poets of the Renaissance looked to emulate the poems of Greco-Roman antiquity, but doing so presented a dilemma: what to do about the gods? Divine intervention plays a major part in the epics of Homer and Virgil—indeed, quarrels within the family of Olympian gods are essential to the narrative structure of those poems—yet poets of the Renaissance recognized that the cantankerous Olympians could not be imitated too closely. The divine action of their classical models had to be transformed to accord with contemporary tastes and Christian belief. From Many Gods to One offers the first comparative study of poetic approaches to the problem of epic divine action. Through readings of Petrarch, Vida, Ariosto, Tasso, and Milton, Tobias Gregorydescribes the narrative and ideological consequences of the epic’s turn from pagan to Christian. Drawing on scholarship in several disciplines—religious studies, classics, history, and philosophy, as well as literature—From Many Gods to One sheds new light on two subjects of enduring importance in Renaissance studies: the precarious balance between classical literary models and Christian religious norms and the role of religion in drawing lines between allies and others.
