Defensive measures: the poetry of Niedecker, Bishop, Glück, and Carson

Defensive Measures Explores Strategies By Which Poets Claim Their Distinctiveness, And Argues That Poetry Is The One Literary Form That Most Insistently Demands A Defense. It Demands A Defense, It Would Seem, Because It Is Perpetually In Crisis - Not Only In Regard To Its Utility And Its Aesthetic Appeal (or The Vigor Of Its Renunciation Of Such An Appeal), But In Regard To Its Generic Existence. Upton Defines A Generative Conception Of Defense And Examines In A New Light The Poetry Of Lorine Niedecker, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Gluck, And Anne Carson. In Writing About Bishop, Upton Puts This Well-regarded Poet In A New Framework, Aligning Her Work With That Of Three Poets Whose Aesthetics Might Be Viewed As Antithetical To Her Own And Giving Due To The More Experimental Elements Of Her Poetics.--jacket. Poetry As Defense -- Humility Does Not Cancel Stubbornness: Defensive Positioning In Lorine Niedecker -- Tilting At Sense: Defensive Nonsense In Elizabeth Bishop -- Erotic Distances: Defensive Elevations In Louise Glück -- Scholarship And Debasement: Overlaying The Defenses In Anne Carson -- The Price We Pay For Making Claims. Lee Upton. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 136-141) And Index. Much of our strongest poetry that learned its lessons from early modernism lives by its defensive measures, that is, by means of reversing, inverting, and challenging in covert ways a dominant perceptual mode. Defensive Measures explores strategies by which poets claim their distinctiveness, and argues that poetry is the one literary form that most insistently demands a defense. It demands a defense, it would seem, because it is perpetually in crisis - not only in regard to its utility and its aesthetic appeal (or the vigor of its renunciation of such an appeal), but in regard to its generic existence. Upton defines a generative conception of defense and examines in a new light the poetry of Lorine Niedecker, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Gluck, and Anne Carson. In writing about Bishop. Upton puts this well-regarded poet in a new framework, aligning her work with that of three poets whose aesthetics might be viewed as antithetical to her own ...