Synopses & Reviews
Is American vision implicitly possessive, as a generation of critics contends? By viewing the American poetic tradition through the prism of pragmatism, Elisa New contests this claim. A new reading of how poetry "sees," her work is a passionate defense of the power of the poem, the ethics of perception, and the broader possibilities of American sight.
American poems see more fully, and less invasively, than accounts of American literature as an inscription of imperial national ideology would allow. Moreover, New argues, their ways of seeing draw on, and develop, a vigorous mode of national representation alternative to the appropriative sort found in the quintessential American genre of encounter, the romance. Grounding her readings of Dickinson, Frost, Moore, and Williams in foundational texts by Edwards, Jefferson, Audubon, and Thoreau, New shows how varieties of attentiveness and solicitude cultivated in the early literature are realized in later poetry. She then discloses how these ideas infuse the philosophical notions about pragmatic experience codified by Emerson, James, and Dewey. As these philosophers insisted, and as New's readings prove, art is where the experience of experience can be had: to read, as to write, a poem is to let the line guide one's way.
Review
"This volume [is] a longed-for return of positivism and appreciation after the dark scrutinies of new historicism...Altogether, New's is a masterpiece of critical writing: philosophically shrewd, beautifully articulate, calmly learned, endlessly surprising, deft in general and in detail...Surely of interest to students of US literature at all levels."
--S. C. Dillon, Choice"In the hands of Elisa New's beautifully written study, the American Poem vibrates with 'the feel' of living in a land of substance and of experience in pursuit of itself."
--Martha Banta, University of California, Los Angeles"Elisa New's searching analysis of the rhetoric of landscape brilliantly refutes current orthodoxies in American criticism. Her close readings of poems by such as Dickinson, Moore, Williams, and Frost demonstrate the powers of the critical mind uncannily alert to what John Ashbery has called 'the lumps and trials' of the poetic experience."
--Mark Ford, University College London"Elisa New's The Line's Eye is a glorious work: exuberant, learned,discriminate, purposeful, eloquent."
--Allen Grossman, Johns Hopkins University"Elisa New is out to challenge the presuppositions of much revisionist criticism of American writing by attempting to recuperate the notion of the aesthetic...Postulating an 'other American Protestantism,' she manages to give us the fullest elaboration we have yet had of a pragmatist tradition in American poetry."
--Giles Gunn, University of California, Santa Barbara"[Elisa New possesses a] clear and deep sympathy with the lyric gifts Protestant ethics can bestow and have already bestowed on our culture."
--Susan Howe, State University of New York, Buffalo"There is a largeness of scope and vision to this book that has been missing from American cultural criticism for far too long a time; yet New also closely observes the minute particular. The resulting breakthrough, while it shatters some sacred vessels, also restores us to that basic sanity and grace that are the kinetic heritage of America's greatest writers, thinkers, poets, and critics."
--Barton Levi St.Armand, Brown University"What you get in this challenging, engaging book is an argument about poetry that embraces, without embarrassment, poetry's ways of seeing. I think it has a great chance to redirect the whole enterprise of the academic discussion of poetry by elevating that actual and operant respect for poetry required in those who would presume to assess it."
--Albert J. von Frank, Washington State UniversityReview
This volume [is] a longed-for return of positivism and appreciation after the dark scrutinies of new historicism...Altogether, New's is a masterpiece of critical writing: philosophically shrewd, beautifully articulate, calmly learned, endlessly surprising, deft in general and in detail...Surely of interest to students of US literature at all levels. S. C. Dillon
Review
If poetry is understood to be a "genre of experience," then one may all too easily see through genre to experience as if neither the formal nor the historical aspects of representation got in the way. Since they do, and since New knows that they do, the book must negotiate the obstacles to its own ambitions (her vision's nemeses and her romance's corrections) and so ends up taking just the path of most resistance that it admires in American thought. Choice
Review
In the hands of Elisa New's beautifully written study, the American Poem vibrates with 'the feel' of living in a land of substance and of experience in pursuit of itself. Virginia Jackson - Raritan
Review
Elisa New's searching analysis of the rhetoric of landscape brilliantly refutes current orthodoxies in American criticism. Her close readings of poems by such as Dickinson, Moore, Williams, and Frost demonstrate the powers of the critical mind uncannily alert to what John Ashbery has called 'the lumps and trials' of the poetic experience. Martha Banta, University of California, Los Angeles
Review
Elisa New is out to challenge the presuppositions of much revisionist criticism of American writing by attempting to recuperate the notion of the aesthetic...Postulating an 'other American Protestantism,' she manages to give us the fullest elaboration we have yet had of a pragmatist tradition in American poetry. Mark Ford, University College London
Review
[Elisa New possesses a] clear and deep sympathy with the lyric gifts Protestant ethics can bestow and have already bestowed on our culture. Giles Gunn, University of California, Santa Barbara
Review
Elisa New's The Line's Eye is a glorious work: exuberant, learned, discriminate, purposeful, eloquent. Susan Howe, State University of New York, Buffalo
Review
There is a largeness of scope and vision to this book that has been missing from American cultural criticism for far too long a time; yet New also closely observes the minute particular. The resulting breakthrough, while it shatters some sacred vessels, also restores us to that basic sanity and grace that are the kinetic heritage of America's greatest writers, thinkers, poets, and critics. Allen Grossman, Johns Hopkins University
Review
What you get in this challenging, engaging book is an argument about poetry that embraces, without embarrassment, poetry's ways of seeing. I think it has a great chance to redirect the whole enterprise of the academic discussion of poetry by elevating that actual and operant respect for poetry required in those who would presume to assess it. Barton Levi St.Armand, Brown University
Synopsis
Is American vision implicitly possessive, as a generation of critics contends? By viewing the American poetic tradition through the prism of pragmatism, Elisa New contests this claim. A new reading of how poetry "sees," her work is a passionate defense of the power of the poem, the ethics of perception, and the broader possibilities of American sight.< p="">
Synopsis
By viewing the American poetic tradition through the prism of pragmatism, Elisa New contests the claim that American vision is implicitly possessive. She argues that American poems see more fully, and less invasively, than accounts of American literature as an inscription of imperial national ideology would allow. Moreover, their ways of seeing draw on, and develop, a vigorous mode of national representation alternative to the appropriative sort found in the quintessential American genre of encounter, the romance.
About the Author
Elisa New is Professor of English at Harvard University and author of The Regenerate Lyric.
Harvard University
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Poetic Experience
Theories and Practices
Range-finding
Line's Eye, Lit Stream; Jefferson, Audubon, and Thoreau
Nature
The Force of the Fable: Thoreau, Dickinson, and Moore
So Much Depends: Audubon, Dickinson, and Williams
Culture
To Set the Voices Speaking: Jefferson, Williams, and Frost
Work, Works, Working: Edwards, Frost, and Moore
Notes
Works Cited
Index