The Poetic Pendulum: Valéry and Modern American Poetry

Lisa Goldfarb’s Unexpected Affinities: Modern American Poetry and Symbolist Poetics adopts the rare one-to-many mode of poetic influence studies: it sets up a symbolist theory as the prism through which later modernistic poetic lights can pass and cross each other unexpectedly, converging while diverging. Through the central metaphor of Paul Valéry’s pendulum of sound and sense, Goldfarb attempts to account for how the works of Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop have traveled back and forth between abstract thought and sensual impressions, creating a modern poetic music that is derived from modulations and variations rather than conventional metrical patterns.