The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics by Ramazani Jahan Cavanagh Clare Cushman Stephen Greene Roland Rouzer Paul

Author:Ramazani, Jahan, Cavanagh, Clare, Cushman, Stephen, Greene, Roland, Rouzer, Paul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

P. Shorey, “Choriambic Dimeter and the Rehabilitation of the Antispast,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 38 (1907 ); L. Pearson, ed., Aristoxenus. Elementa Rhythmica (1990)—both works in favor of isochronous analysis; J. W. White, The Verse of Greek Comedy (1912)—against.

A. T. COLE; T.V.F. BROGAN

LONG POEM. The term is used almost exclusively for mod. poetry, usually in Eng. Charles Altieri notes that the mod. long poem is distinguished by a “desire to achieve epic breadth by relying on structural principles inherent in lyric rather than narrative modes.” Incorporating other texts, lost voices, political speech, or bits of memory, the long poem foregrounds the writer’s role in making a distinctive way through such often-resistant material.

A cluster of early 20th-c. poems put into play the tensions and possibilities that continue to mark the genre. Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1925–72) invents a series of ling. rituals through which the poet seeks to gather and give voice to the “luminous details” of what he sees as his culture’s religious, political, and literary heritage. In their eventual acknowledgment of the limits of one person’s ability to make such a synthesis cohere, however, The Cantos made the writing of such a text its real subject, an idea that now dominates the genre. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), sensing in its central figure’s speechlessness before the world’s “horns and motors” a way to move forward, comes to life in its own writing, weaving broken-off shards of the culture into a richly expressive inner idiom. Discovering that the nightly bombing of London during World War II opened new sources of inspiration even as it destroyed old forms, H.D.’s Trilogy (1944–46) attempts to “alchemize” a new manner of thinking out of melted-down bits of once-central texts. W. C. Williams, in Paterson (1946–58), responds to the work of his expatriate peers with “a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands,” turning not to the shattered forms of trads. past but to the broken words of ordinary people, shaping the voices around him into a revolutionary epic form. Finally, Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930) focuses even more explicitly on Am. voices and hist., attempting to draw them toward a “mystical synthesis” suggested by the “unfractioned idiom” of the arcing Brooklyn Bridge. As with all these early moderns, Crane’s charged lang., though driven by a shared dream, unfolds itself in a markedly individual way.

McHale has argued that, even as a “relatively stable modernist poetics was crystallized out from the churning heterogeneity of early-modernist innovation,” what fell out of this official hist. “remained available for revisiting and reappropriation by later generations of innovators.” This is clearly the case with the 20th-c. long poem, as we see the work of these predecessors mined over and over again by the writers who followed them. Keller usefully sorts these reappropriations into three groups: *epic-based poems; *lyric sequences; and experimental, less representational texts. While the categories overlap, they identify ways of mapping the confrontation of an individual sensibility and larger cultural concerns that remained central to the long poem as it continued to develop.

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