The Poetry of Post Modernity: Anglo/American Encodings

157 Pages·1994·7.67 MB·English

by  Dennis Brown

The Poetry of
Postmodernity
Anglo/American Encodings
Dennis Brown
THE POETRY OF POSTMODERNITY
Also by Dennis Brown
INTERTEXTUAL DYNAMICS WITHIN THE LITERARY
CROWD - JOYCE, LEWIS, POUND AND ELIOT:
The Men of 1914
MS MOFFAT
(under the pseudonym Ned Brown)
THE MODERNIST SELF IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY
ENGLISH LITERATURE:
A Study in Self-Fragmentation
The Poetry of
Postmodernity
Anglo/American Encodings
Dennis Brown
Professor
Department of English
University of Hertfordshire
u
St. Martin's Press
© Dennis Brown 1994
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First published in Great Britain 1994 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
ISBN 0-333-60473-3
Printed in Great Britain by
Ipswich Book Co Ltd
Ipswich, Suffolk
First published in the United States of America 1994 by
Scholarly and Reference Division,
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 0-312-12093-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brown, Dennis, 1940-
The poetry of postmodernity : Anglo/American encodings / Dennis Brown.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-312-12093-1
1. English poetry—20th century—History and criticism.
2. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism.
3. Modernism (Literature)—Great Britain. 4. Modernism
(Literature)—United States. I. Title.
PR478.M6B73 1994
821' .9109—dc20 93-48922
CIP
In memory of
Elsie Worvill (1916-91)
George Macbeth (1932-92), poet
Nola Clendinning Pechey (1943-93), artist
In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin
Marshall McLuhan
Contents
Preface ix
1 Introduction 1
2 W. H. Auden's "Hermes" 15
3 Allen Ginsberg's "America" 30
4 Sylvia Plath's "Ariel" 45
5 John Berryman's "Henry" 59
6 Ted Hughes' "Crow" 75
7 Geoffrey Hill's "Mercia" 90
8 John Ashbery's "Wave" 105
9 R. S. Thomas's "Amen" 120
10 Conclusion 134
Index 142
vii
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Preface
This book was written between the winter of 1991-2 and the spring of
1993: the specific time frame seems important in terms of the ongoing
postmodernism debate - as we race towards the double millennium.
Such a declaration inevitably owns to its temporal partiality and im
plies a fairly imminent sell-by date. In Wyndham Lewis's description,
we are all "time snobs" now: both the pace of global developments
and the instantaneity of communications constantly outflank any
attempt to make a fixed map of the contemporary scene. This is, in
fact, what makes the discussion of 'postmodernity' continuous, con
tingent, confusing - and exciting. In such a situation it seems neces
sary to date a particular stage of one's thinking: so I shall 'sign' this as
of Easter 1993.
I should like here to thank Peter Widdowson for cannily pointing
me, nearly three years ago, towards the direction I was going in -
without my then knowing it. Thanks, too, to the East London (and
FAB) 'Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere' conferences where
two of the chapters below were tried out and whose discussions
have helped form my own sense of the nature of postmodernity.
Also thanks to the encouragement or advice of Phil Ballard, Eibhlin
Evans, Paul Gatland, Patrick Grant, Graham Holderness, Sarah
Hutton, Sharon Monteith, Graham Pechey, Jean Radford, Eric
Trudgill and George Wotton, and to Zygmunt Bauman whose book
Intimations of Postmodernity came out at a crucial stage of my own
project and who responded, in detail, to some material I sent him -
"in the spirit of dialogue".
The writing of this book has coincided with the welcome trans
formation of my teaching base from Hatfield Polytechnic to the
University of Hertfordshire. With its roots in a gift of land by A. S.
Butler of De Havilland, our institution has itself played a role in the
construction of postmodern realities - most particularly in aero-
engineering, information science, psychology and pharmacological
biochemistry: it has been a privilege to serve on research commit
tees with representatives of such disciplines. The work below ori
ginated in a research project registered with our old Research and
Consultancy Committee.
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