Believing in Words

American Poetry after Modernism: The Power of the Word completes a trilogy that began with Albert Gelpi’s The Tenth Muse (1975), which examined romanticism in American poetry, and continued with A Coherent Splendor (1988), his book on American modernism.¹ Both of these books argued for a dialectic—or in certain ways, a doubled dialectic—in American poetics: romanticism forms out of its argument with Enlightenment rationalism and itself breaks into dialectical strains embodied by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allan Poe; modernism forms out of its argument with romanticism and then breaks into its own dialectical strains of imagism and symbolism. Therefore, in Gelpi’s analysis, after modernism, American poetry splits into the dialectically related strains of postmodernism and neoromanticism. It is his aim to define the mainstream of American poetics, so most of the poets in this study are well-known figures such as Robert Lowell or John Ashbery. However, Gelpi is one of the few commentators to argue for a neoromantic poetics, so some poets are raised to prominence by his argument. The most surprising inclusion may be Jack Kerouac, better known for his novels than his poetry, and not many critics would include William Everson among company such as Lowell or Ashbery. In this way, the book presents readings of thoroughly canonical poets supplemented by a few figures that bolster the argument for neoromanticism.

In a time when the current practice is to talk about modernisms and postmodernisms in the plural and lowercase, Gelpi’s examination of “Modernism,” “Postmodernism,” and, indeed, “Neoromanticism” in American Poetry after Modernism might seem like something of a throwback to previous critical terminology. In fact, his discussion of the “American poetic tradition” in the coda might strike some readers as reducing the diversity and multiplicity of U.S. poetries (again, the current preferred phrasing) down to an Eliotic canon of the elite. However, the terms of Gelpi’s argument demonstrate that he is not proposing stabilizing or exclusionary categories but rather is reading the postwar poets who mean the most to him in terms of their own struggles to develop and practice the poetics that would allow them to respond to the political conditions and personal crises brought on by American Cold War culture and society. What is most powerful in Gelpi’s readings is his willingness to treat each poet in her or his own terms and connect the concerns of each to other poets or movements in fruitful contrasts or meaningful comparisons. Although his loyalties and preferences clearly lie with the poets he dubs neoromantics, Gelpi’s central argument is that the neoromantic and the postmodernist impulses are in constant, dialectical engagement in the poets under consideration. Whereas the dialectical play between these two poles sometimes leaves a reader uncertain if a poet is primarily postmodern or neoromantic, especially when it comes to the Language poets, that is a small price to pay for the larger view of American poetics that this book convincingly articulates.

The chapters that pair two exemplary figures reveal most clearly and successfully these entanglements and how they temporarily resolve by gravitating to one pole of the dialectic. The chapters with dialectical pairs begin with “The Language of Crisis,” on Robert Lowell and John Berryman, and in this case, rather than a typical account of confessional poetry, Gelpi comes to the conclusion that Lowell’s crisis of faith drove him in the direction of postmodernism, while Berryman’s crisis of identity led him to the faith that Lowell had abandoned and an incipient neoromanticism. The chapter “The Language of Flux” considers Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery as inheritors of Wallace Stevens’s “rage for order” in a world of chaotic flux and finds Bishop’s neoromantic solution in her “measured understatement and stoic resignation” and Ashbery’s postmodernist one in his acknowledgment of “flux as the state and condition of language” (74). As the discussion moves toward Language poetry, “The Language of Vision” shows how Denise Levertov’s...