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:	9780415970587
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/11/2004
Series:	Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(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

1. Introduction 2. Whitman's Ferry: Platform of Culture Whitman and the Oratory of Early Nineteenth-Century America Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Architecture The Ferry as Monument 3. Crossing Over Brooklyn Ferry: Hart Crane's The Bridge as Monument The Constuctive Principle The Architecture of Anamnesis in The Bridge The Final Figure and the Life of Monument 4. Urban Revitalization: Robert Lowell's 'For the Union Dead' and the American Tradition of Monumental Rhetoric Coordinations The Cemeteries of Culture Enabling Tradition 5. After Lowell: Some Conclusions and Final Considerations