Book Cover
E-book
Author Forbes, Deborah.

Title Sincerity's shadow : self-consciousness in British romantic and mid-twentieth-century American poetry / Deborah Forbes
Published Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2004

Copies

Description 1 online resource (viii, 244 pages)
Summary In essays comparing poets as seemingly different in context and temperament as Wordsworth and Adrienne Rich, Lord Byron and Anne Sexton, John Keats and Elizabeth Bishop, Deborah Forbes reveals unexpected convergences of poetic strategy
In a work of surprising range and authority, Deborah Forbes refocuses critical discussion of both Romantic and modern poetry. Sincerity's Shadow is a versatile conceptual toolkit for reading poetry. Ever since Wordsworth redefined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," poets in English have sought to represent a "sincere" self-consciousness through their work. Forbes's generative insight is that this project can only succeed by staging its own failures. Self-representation never achieves final sincerity, but rather produces an array of "sincerity effects" that give form to poetry's exploration of self. In essays comparing poets as seemingly different in context and temperament as Wordsworth and Adrienne Rich, Lord Byron and Anne Sexton, John Keats and Elizabeth Bishop, Forbes reveals unexpected convergences of poetic strategy. A lively and convincing dialectic is sustained through detailed readings of individual poems. By preserving the possible claims of sincerity longer than postmodern criticism has tended to, while understanding sincerity in the strictest sense possible, Forbes establishes a new vantage on the purposes of poetry
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 197-239) and index
Notes Print version record
Subject English poetry -- 19th century -- History and criticism
Self-consciousness (Awareness) in literature.
American poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism
Postmodernism (Literature) -- English-speaking countries
Romanticism -- English-speaking countries
Sincerity in literature.
Self in literature.
POETRY -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
POETRY / General
American poetry
English poetry
Postmodernism (Literature)
Romanticism
Self-consciousness (Awareness) in literature
Self in literature
Sincerity in literature
English-speaking countries
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780674037106
0674037103
9780674011885
0674011880