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Saying Yes at Lightning: Threat and the Provisional Image in Post-Romantic Poetry
Saying Yes at Lightning explores how four poets - Gerard Manley Hopkins, H. D., Osip Mandelstam, and William Carlos Williams - use imagery to confront that which is most deeply threatening to them. In showing how risky subject matter is matched by stylistic risk, the author sheds light on a previously unexplored, but quite significant, dynamic in post-romantic poetry - the pervasive use of «provisional» or destabilized images.
Book Details
- Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publi
- Publish Date: Jan 29th, 2002
- Pages: 295
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00lb
- EAN: 9780820439570
- Categories: • American - General• General• American - General
About the Author
The Author: Kevin O'Brien is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Chapman University in Orange, California. A specialist in post-romantic and modernist literature in English and in Russian, he received his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. His translations include Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov and Elena Guro's The Little Camels of the Sky.
More books by Kevin O'Brien
Praise for this book
«Stunning readings of four long poems: Hopkins's 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', with its fearsome storm and death; Mandelstam's 'Horseshoe Finder', the Russian poet's lament for the wholesale destruction of time-honored values; H. D.'s 'The Walls Do Not Fall', her courageous response to the firebombing of London; and Williams's 'Paterson', at the mercy of natural disaster and the breakdown of language and society. In each case, the poet confronts the threat of dissolution and individual peril and - by taking a stylistic risk and expanding the medium - emerges with a renewed sense of community and self. Kevin O'Brien discerns profound affinities of imagery, voice, and vision in these seemingly disparate texts, and he succeeds brilliantly in illuminating one in the light of the others. Impeccably researched, sensitively contextualized, and deeply insightful, 'Saying Yes at Lightning' is a major justification of the comparative method.» (Robert P. Hughes, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley)
«Kevin O'Brien has written a compelling study of the relationship between violence and linguistic dissolution in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. He is an extraordinary close reader of poetry, and he has a particular talent for illuminating texts that stretch the boundaries of poetic language. This is a book that has much to teach us about the writers it treats.» (Carol T. Christ, Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley)
«Kevin O'Brien's instructive comparative study vivifies our sense of what modern poetry is about and why it addresses our lives with such intensity. Others have noted the peculiar centrality of metaphor in modern verse, but no one before him has shown so finely how metaphor functions in this body of poetry as the principal locus for the poet's sense of existential danger. Modernist literature has characteristically sought the truth in extremes, and Kevin O'Brien, exercising the skills of the nearly lost art of close reading, shows what this means in regard to poetic form.» (Robert Alter, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley)
«Kevin O'Brien has written a compelling study of the relationship between violence and linguistic dissolution in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. He is an extraordinary close reader of poetry, and he has a particular talent for illuminating texts that stretch the boundaries of poetic language. This is a book that has much to teach us about the writers it treats.» (Carol T. Christ, Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley)
«Kevin O'Brien's instructive comparative study vivifies our sense of what modern poetry is about and why it addresses our lives with such intensity. Others have noted the peculiar centrality of metaphor in modern verse, but no one before him has shown so finely how metaphor functions in this body of poetry as the principal locus for the poet's sense of existential danger. Modernist literature has characteristically sought the truth in extremes, and Kevin O'Brien, exercising the skills of the nearly lost art of close reading, shows what this means in regard to poetic form.» (Robert Alter, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley)