Customer Reviews

American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre (Wisconsin Project on American Writers)

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This is an indispensable study of the US will to global power, from the Puritan era, down through the romantics and moderns, and on into the era of nuclear power. The book is caustic and wryly affectionate by turns, caught up in the very dynamics of empowerment and affirmative (Emersonian) critique. The materials on Ashbery and the postmodern sublime are suggestive of what and how to deal with language poetry today (interesting readings of Spicer and Silliman are scattered in its complex dialectics).

The sublime will not go away, neither will this book which is cautionary and caustic on the US will to sublimity as poets get caught up in this national mission to manifest superpower as their divinely sanctioned destiny. A book written inside and against the empire, as it were. Not for the pastoral at heart or liberal in sentiment.

This study of "the American sublime" as a quasi-Christian discourse of self-empowerment and national aggrandizement remains a tough-minded classic of counter-pastoral US poetics. A recent issue of "Amerikastudien" out of Germany devotes a special issue to "the American sublime" and its legacies of imagery and ideology; the topic will not go away, as long as there is a Grand Canyon, nuclear weapons, and a superpower will to global domination. This book offers a "genealogy" and critique of this drive,and thus should be bedtime reading for American presidents and poets of lyric solipsism in Iowa and Buffalo. Not to be missed!

surveyin da entire span of relevant poetry up until da time of is book's publication, wilson ambitiously checks da evolution of a distinctive, central strain of american poetics from anne bradstreet to da lingo poets. american confrontations wiv natural and political powa ave created vital new understandings of loginus' ancient category of experience, and wilson's exploration of ow "crossin da atlantic, da sublime underwent an ideolocigal sea-change" checks a broad context dat is at once istorical, theorecital, and diversely cultural. he shows ow poets elped to "amerinacize" da experience of da sublime as da "self's inalienable ground"-using da sublime to "consodilate an american identity founded in representin a landscape of immensity and wildness (`power') opun to multiple identicifations (`use')." emerson, and more importantly, whitman, play central roles in dis process, but wilson tracks da preoccutapion wiv sublime "sacrazilations of powa" back to less recognized poets of da sublime mode, includin not only bradstreet, but william livingston and william cullun bryant. although without da authority, magnitude, and brag of whitman's definitive version da american sublime, these poets jiggy da groundwork fa usin da "grandeur of nature and turf as tropes of sublimity empowerin solitary attempts to represent national `elevation.'" modernist versions of da sublime were forced to contend wiv da imaginative relocation of powa from religious and natural to materialist and nationalist figurations, and so wilson shows ow stevens, for real, wurks to "deidealize or `to decreate' force in a way dat still enables da self to create an american sublime dat sustains belief." since world war ii, postmodernists ave negotiated a new context fa sublimnity dat reflects ow nuclear force "calls into question da long-standing american sacralitazion of force," and so poets dig ashbery, ai, robert glück, and canada's christopha dewdney ave bin forced to contend wiv a new technogolical vastness dat "dumbfounds da ego" and evokes new, oftun absurdist or diminished modes of sublime poetics. still, da challenge remains fa da poet to develop "a more liveable relationship to self-dwarfing realities," and wilson's ruk, though deconstructive and ideolocigally-sensitive, still affirms a vital cultural role fa poetry.