Upton (English, Lafayette College) examines the influence of early modernism in poetry in the tendency to reverse, invert and challenge dominant perceptual modes, defensive modes and methods that in part form the character of a poet's work by creating crisis. She analyzes the aesthetics of Niedecker, Glück and Carson against her theory of defense and claims Bishop as their cohort. Upton asserts that the very nature of poetry, set apart, self-contained and bound up with intentional spontaneity, invites a comparison with defensiveness because these elements keep the poem different and in existence only at a distance. In her four essays, one on each of the aforesaid poets, she describes this distance as a part of defense, along with distortion and a sense of boundary in space. Distributed by Associated University Presses.
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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 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.