The Poetics of the Everyday : : Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse / / Siobhan Phillips.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Phillips, Siobhan,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2009]; ©2009
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (336 p.)

Wallace Stevens once described the "malady of the "idian," lamenting the dull weight of everyday regimen. Yet he would later hail "that which is always beginning, over and over"—recognizing, if not celebrating, the possibility of fresh invention. Focusing on the poems of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill, Siobhan Phillips positions everyday time as a vital category in modernist aesthetics, American literature, and poetic theory. She eloquently reveals how, through particular but related means, each of these poets converts the necessity of "idian experience into an aesthetic and experiential opportunity. In Stevens, Phillips analyzes the implications of cyclic dualism. In Frost, she explains the theoretical depth of a habitual "middle way." In Bishop's work, she identifies the attempt to turn recurrent mornings into a "ceremony" rather than a sentence, and in Merrill, she shows how cosmic theories rely on daily habits. Phillips ultimately demonstrates that a poetics of everyday time contributes not only to a richer understanding of these four writers but also to descriptions of their era, estimations of their genre, and ongoing reconfigurations of the issues that literature reflects and illuminates.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Poetics of Everyday Time -- 1. The Middle Living of Robert Frost -- 2. The Faithful Mode of Wallace Stevens -- 3. The Everyday Elegies of Elizabeth Bishop -- 4. The Cosmic Dawnings of James Merrill -- Conclusion: Everyday Pasts and Everyday Futures -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index