Shifting Ground : Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry

The look of the American landscape has changed since the 19th century; so has our idea of landscape. Costello reads six 20th-century American poets who have reflected and shaped this transformation and in the process renovated landscape with new images from the natural world and new forms for imagining the earth and our relation to it. "A comprehensive exploration of a powerful dynamic in American poetry, Shifting Ground ranges from the sly subversions of Robert Frost's "Directive" to the vertiginous "temporal space" of John Ashbery's "Haunted Landscape." Sustained readings of dozens of major poems by Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore open new perspectives on landscape as metaphor in these canonical moderns, while illuminating chapters on Amy Clampitt, A.R. Ammons, and John Ashbery map the fluctuating terrain of postmodern poetry with compelling clarity."--Jacket Just as the look of the American landscape has changed since the nineteenth century, so has our idea of landscape. Here Bonnie Costello reads six twentieth-century American poets who have reflected and shaped this transformation and in the process renovated landscape by drawing new images from the natural world and creating new forms for imagining the earth and our relation to it.