'Putting it all down, leaving it all out' [electronic resource] : scale in post-1945 American poetry
Keywords: Comparative Literature.

"'Putting it All Down, Leaving it All Out': Scale in Post-1945 American Poetry" offers a vision of twentieth-century American literature through the lens of "scale, " a formal element so basic that it is often overlooked. I analyze extremes of poetic brevity and length as complementary, distinctly postmodern responses to the increasing marginalization of poetry in the period following World War II. Like engineers subjecting a compound to extremes of heat and cold, poets -- from minimalists such as Robert Creeley and Elizabeth Bishop to maximalists such as James Merrill and Frank Stanford -- approach the limits of brevity and length as both a test of language's capacity to signify and a testament to poetry's value in exploring how language mediates experience. My approach unites an intrinsic focus on the semantics and signification of specific poems with an extrinsic attention to social pressures and historical practices. Poems that near the limit of utter silence demand to be read as bold declarations of what poetry is good for. At the opposite extreme, long poems invite the question of why, in fact, they exist as poems (rather than novels, memoirs, or plays, for example), thus enacting a similar insistence on poetry's particular relation to language. While I identify both brevity and length in the postwar period as constituting "tests" of poetry, I contrast how poets used the short and the long to pursue the brief, intense flash of epiphany or to evoke the rich complexity and detail of daily life. The lens of scale allows for a reconsideration of writers apart from the reified categories of schools and movements, revealing urban Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and rural Objectivist poet Lorine Niedecker's shared interest in haiku and suggesting an alternate vision of Creeley than that offered under the rubric of Charles Olson, "Projective Verse, " and the Black Mountain school. Among other insights, my project questions the frequent conflation of formal scale with poetic genre. In particular, I reveal the persistence of lyric and epic in the postmodern period as sources of nostalgia and as incitements for rupture with the past. In a chapter on the post-1945 haiku boom, for example, I demonstrate how poets embraced the Japanese form as a refreshing alternative to lyric inwardness. In my readings of poems by Niedecker, Jack Kerouac, and others, I theorize the divergent responses to haiku as acts of adoption, inclusion, or adaptation. A second chapter contrasts the uses of relative brevity in poems by Robert Creeley and Elizabeth Bishop as divergent approaches to poetic world-making. While both poets value the intensity of focus that a short poem offers, they envision the poetic encounter in dramatically different ways, which I conceptualize as "immersion" versus "presence." Other chapters investigate the deliberately anti-epic approaches to domestic dailiness in feminist long poems by Lyn Hejinian and Bernadette Mayer and explore the ambivalence to epic in Merrill's "The Changing Light at Sandover" and Stanford's "The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You." Ultimately, I argue that formal extremes of both brevity and length test the limits of language's ability to signify and affirm poetry's continued significance during a period of increasing distraction and competing demands for readers' attention. Revealing scale as an essential formal element of twentieth-century verse, I analyze throughout how writers use the relationship between the space a poem occupies on the page and the space that poetry occupies in a reader's life to question and make claims about literature's proper ambition and scope.