Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Running, Walking & Jogging, U.S. & Canadian Poetry - 20th Century - Literary Criticism

Walks in the World

Name: Walks in the World
Author: R Gilbert
ISBN: 9780691068589

by R Gilbert

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Overview

In the twentieth century no form of experience has been more frequently taken up by poets eager to capture both the openness and fluidity of life and the aesthetic closure of an artwork than that of a walk. Examining the walk poem, Roger Gilbert contends that at its heart is the "desire to keep what we have lived." What is the appeal of the walk poem for modern American poets? According to Gilbert, it provides a ready-made frame within which to explore the full range of individual consciousness as it responds to and reflects on the world immediately at hand. The unstructured, plotless character of the walk allows poets to move freely from place to place, image to image, thought to thought. Suggesting that the walk poem strikes a compromise between the American obsession with process or movement and more traditionally mimetic concerns, Gilbert shows how it enables the poet to apprehend the world as horizon rather than landscape. Through perceptive and extended analyses of walk poems by Frost, Stevens, Williams, Roethke, Bishop, O'Hara, Snyder, Ammons, and Ashbery, he uncovers a spectrum of representational strategies for transforming passing experiences into the more lasting substance of poetry. Walks in the World addresses anyone who takes poetry seriously. "Walks in the World will certainly influence the discussion of American poetry for years to come."--Lee Edelman, Tufts University

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Editorials

Library Journal

Originally a dissertation (directed by John Hollander and Geoffrey Hartman), this study surveys the genre of American ``walk poems,'' including selected works of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O'Hara, Gary Snyder, A.A. Ammons (particularly his essay, ``A Poem Is a Walk''), and John Ashbery. A composite of local or landscape and travel poetry, the genre, based on poets walking for meditation and observation, provides a ``frame'' that enables the poet to combine ``the closure of art with the openness . . . of experience . . . in an effort to capture the precise transactions between self and environment.'' Although Walt Whitman and Robert Lowell are underemphasized and one misses what Gilbert would say about other living and women writers, this is an intelligent study with insightful explication of many difficult poems. Recommended for college and graduate school libraries.-- Frank Allen, SUNY at Cobleskill