Beautiful Enemies
Friendship and Postwar American Poetry
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- USD 24.99
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- USD 24.99
Descripción editorial
Although it has long been commonplace to imagine the archetypal American poet singing a solitary "Song of Myself," much of the most enduring American poetry has actually been preoccupied with the drama of friendship. In this lucid and absorbing study, Andrew Epstein argues that an obsession with both the pleasures and problems of friendship erupts in the "New American Poetry" that emerges after the Second World War. By focusing on some of the most significant postmodernist American poets--the "New York School" poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and their close contemporary Amiri Baraka--Beautiful Enemies reveals a fundamental paradox at the heart of postwar American poetry and culture: the avant-garde's commitment to individualism and nonconformity runs directly counter to its own valorization of community and collaboration. In fact, Epstein demonstrates that the clash between friendship and nonconformity complicates the legendary alliances forged by postwar poets, becomes a predominant theme in the poetry they created, and leaves contemporary writers with a complicated legacy to negotiate. Rather than simply celebrating friendship and poetic community as nurturing and inspiring, these poets represent friendship as a kind of exhilarating, maddening contradiction, a site of attraction and repulsion, affinity and rivalry.
Challenging both the reductive critiques of American individualism and the idealized, heavily biographical celebrations of literary camaraderie one finds in much critical discussion, this book provides a new interpretation of the peculiar dynamics of American avant-garde poetic communities and the role of the individual within them. By situating his extensive and revealing readings of these highly influential poets against the backdrop of Cold War cultural politics and within the context of American pragmatist thought, Epstein uncovers the collision between radical self-reliance and the siren call of the interpersonal at the core of postwar American poetry.
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The premise is simple-John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara were frenemies, as were O'Hara and LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka)-but Florida State University assistant professor Epstein handles it with such care and intelligence, that his study ends up revealing a great deal about the American midcentury avant-garde. For those in the know, the above two friendships won't be news, but never before have they been presented in such painstaking detail, backed by a wealth of letters and readings of the poets' verse that are patient in the explication, and in their refusal to draw easy conclusions about the nature of the relationships under discussion. Two opening chapters offer an introduction to the avant-garde as it functioned in American culture, and to its Emersonian origins, followed by individual chapters considering each of the three poets (with close references to the other two, and to many other poets and artists), and a final summation of the many paradoxes and contradictions encountered therein. Anyone with an interest in the ways great poetry depends on complex and extraordinary relationships will find this book deeply rewarding.