1st Edition

The End of the Mind The Edge of the Intelligible in Hardy, Stevens, Larking, Plath, and Gluck

By DeSales Harrison Copyright 2005
    286 Pages
    by Routledge

    286 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book seeks to include among accounts of modern lyric poetry a theory of the poem's relation to the unintelligible. DeSales Harrison draws a distinction between sites of unintelligibility and sights of difficulty; while much has been said about modernist difficulty, little has been said about the attention that poets give to phenomena that by definition arrest, impede, obscure, damage, or destroy the capacity for intelligible representation.

    Introduction: Strange Resistances1. Thomas Hardy: The Broken Lyre2. Wallace Stevens: A Foreign Song3. Philip Larkin: Rather Than Words4. Sylvia Plath: The Stars' Dark Address5. Louise Glück: I Was HereConclusion: Other Ends of the MindBibliographyIndex

    Biography

    DeSales Harrison completed his doctoral work at Harvard. In addition to his academic training, he is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York. He is presently a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in English at Harvard, where he teaches poetry and poetics. At the moment, he has an article on monumentality in Hardy, Larkin, and Bishop, forthcoming from the journal Variations, which is the journal of literature for the University of Zurich. The article will appear in 2003. He has published reviews in the Boston Book Review (with one forthcoming from the Boston Review ) and poems in the Antioch Review0 , the Iowa Review, and in other small magazines.