[New-Poetry] Poet's Poet, Allen Grossman

[jforjames at aol.com]

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6536908.html?industryid=47142

The Poets' Poet
Allen Grossman writes the poems that inspire poets.


How is it that an accomplished poet and scholar, beloved by generations of students, whose work has enjoyed the praise of no less than Harold Bloom, remains, at 76, something of a poet's poet, a secret hero to a few rather than an enthusiasm widely shared?


Allen Grossman's reputation, such as it is, may be owing in part to his difficult-to-classify poems, which never fit neatly into the fashions—confessional writing, myth and deep image poetry, language writing, the current fascination with irony—that have swept the American poetry scene at one time of another in recent decades. His style mixes high modernism—Wallace Stevens's penchant for abstraction, Williams's intimacy with landscape, Auden's elevated diction—but there's also a touch of the devil-may-care duende of Lowell, who was one of Grossman's early poetic touchstones.

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