[New-Poetry] Influential Poets, The Five

[jfq at myuw.net]

why am i not surprised that wiman doesn't get williams.

On Sun, 31 Dec 2006 JforJames at aol.com wrote:

> The Atlantic Monthly | December 2006
>
> An Expert’s Opinion
>
> Influential Poets
> by Christian Wiman
> .....
>
> WALT WHITMAN
> (1819–1892)
> The most influential American poet, beyond  question. He was our first
> memoirist, our earliest Oprah (himself his only  guest), our great prophet of the
> self. You can lay a lot of dreck at Whitman’s  door, but his spirit is so large,
> his voice still so vital, that it’s impossible  to think of him as anything
> but a powerful positive influence. No poet ever  worked harder to project
> himself into the future, and no poet has ever been more  successful. Many
> quintessentially American qualities—individualism, optimism,  pluralism—find their
> best expression in Whitman’s poetry, and even those of us  who have never read
> him are influenced by him.
>
> T. S. ELIOT
> (1888–1965)
> He wrenched poetry into the twentieth century  and gave an entire era a
> language for its anxieties. His influence is on the  wane among poets, or at least
> in a lull, which is unfortunate. Eliot’s work  remains a great model for how
> to root real innovation and experimentation in a  living tradition. It is also
> a reminder of the enduring pleasures of sound in  poetry. But Eliot can’t
> vanish; his work, like Whitman’s, has entered the  culture. We read him even when
> we don’t.
>
> WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
> (1883–1963)
> Williams thought Eliot was a  disaster for American poetry and publicly
> attacked “The Waste Land.” He lost  that battle but won the war. The next time you
> read a contemporary poem that is  dominated by simple visual description,
> devoid of rhyme or meter, and  suspiciously close to a basic prose paragraph
> broken up into lines, you are  tasting the fruit of Williams’s influence. A good
> poet (though not a great one),  Williams isn’t responsible for the blight of
> bad poetry that has followed  him—but it’s hard not to blame him just a little.
>
> WALLACE STEVENS
> (1879–1955)
> As poetry retreated into the academy,  Stevens emerged as the dominant figure
> of the twentieth century. His influence  is at once very deep and very
> narrow. Scholars and poets know his work inside  out, but many educated people haven’
> t even heard of him. The poems are dense,  highly wrought, and full of
> otherworldly beauty—a necessary corrective to the  Williams-esque plain style. But
> his work also has a hothouse,  overintellectualized quality, which has endeared
> it to the academy and which  contemporary poets would do well to purge.
>
> SYLVIA PLATH
> (1932–1963)
> Plath was Robert Lowell’s student. Her  achievement, though astonishing for
> someone who died at thirty, is not  comparable to his, but for the past fifty
> years her work has had more influence.  She’s been a feminist icon, the high
> priestess of Confessionalism, and the  required graveside reading for millions
> of undergraduate existentialists. Her  overall influence has been terrible,
> promoting a kind of narcissistic despair  that persists in many poems, novels,
> and movies today. That her work has  survived all this ancillary frenzy, that it
> remains strange and original and  troubling, is a testament to how good it
> really is.
>
>
> The URL for this page is
> _http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200612/influentials-poets_ (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200612/influentials-poets) .
>
>