The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry

by Jake Adam York

Overview

The Architecture of Address traces the evolution of an American species of lyric capable of public pronouncement without polemic. Beginning with Whitman, Jake Adam York seeks to describe a kind of poem wherein the most ambitious poets—including Hart Crane and Robert Lowell—occupy and reconstruct important public spaces. This study argues that American poets become civic actors when their poems imagine and reconstruct the conceptual architecture of the monument.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415762670
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	06/09/2014
Series:	Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jake Adam York is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado. His criticism has appeared in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and his poems have appeared in Shenandoah , The Southern Review , Crab Orchard Review, and other periodicals.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Chapter 1 Getting in the Way: The Architecture of Address 1

Chapter 2 The Street or Ferry-boat or Public Assembly: Whitman and the Making of Monument 19

Chapter 3 Crossing Over Brooklyn Ferry: The Bridge as Monument 97

Chapter 4 In Common: Lowell, Whitman, Crane, and the Makings of a Mode 143

Chapter 5 In Lowell's Wake, in Lowell's Way: The Monumental Mode in the Late Twentieth Century 173

Notes 187

Bibliography 211

Index 219