Twentieth Century Poetry Selves and Situations

Twentieth-Century Poetry presents detailed studies of the pressures and processes involved when twentieth-century poets have composed poems. It not only deals with the forces working upon them, but also the aesthetic, political, and human pressures that they may deploy when negotiating with these forces.

Peter Robinson's third book of literary criticism presents a sequence of chapters exploring ways that selves and situations interact and become imaginatively identified with each other in poems. Readings of works by Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, Louis MacNeice, W. S. Graham, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Curnow, Charles Tomlinson, Mairi MacInnes, Tom Raworth, and Roy Fisher share an interest in how poems can be both attached to, and detached from, the culture, society, and conditions in which they were written. These studies draw out and underline both the ubiquity and elusiveness of the self in the situation of the text. The poems studied here are also discussed as focal points for relations between readerly and writerly selves and their situations in and over time.

1. - Selves and Situations
2. - Pound's Psychological Hour
3. - Bunting's Emigrant Ballads
4. - MacNeice and Self-Sufficiency
5. - Dependence in W. S. Graham
6. - Elizabeth Bishop's Art
7. - Bishop's Crusoe
8. - Allen Curnow Travels
9. - Tomlinson in the Golfo dei Poeti
10. - 'Absolute Circumstance': Mairi MacInnes
11. - Tom Raworth and Pop Art
12. - Roy Fisher's Last Things