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A Note on Inclusion and Exclusion
This is not a study of American poetry generally, nor simply of American poetry that engages spiritual themes. I focus specifically on what I regard as the School of Pound, poets whose “objectivist” style embodies an Emersonian sense of the “soul” while diligently seeking to avoid abstraction. I am using the term “objectivist” in a broad sense to describe poetic styles that focus on the materiality of the poem in one way or another. I do not refer exclusively to the group of poets formally known as the Objectivists—Oppen, Reznikoff, Zukofsky, etc.—although they fit quite well into the category with which I am concerned. I have focused on certain Black Mountain poets particularly, but intend them as examples of a broader avant-garde tradition that would include many others.
The Beats, the New York School, and the Confessional Poets are not discussed here. The figure of the poet looms large in most of these works, and the focus of the texts tends to be on the surfaces of everyday experience with few hints of a spiritual sensibility. This may seem like a strange thing to say about the Beats, who are a throwback to the British Romantics in many ways, but their works tend to be either personal or social in concern, evoking a lifestyle or a cultural milieu. Their poetics is not intended to evoke inexpressible aspects of experience.
Much the same thing could be said about the New York School, with the exception of Ashbery. Ashbery’s work is assembled from the cultural surface of discourse, placing technical and philosophical terms on the same level as quotes from Bazooka Bubble Gum wrappers. He certainly excises the self from his poems, as do the language poets and others who use aleatory techniques (or random processes), but, like those others, he has no transcendental component in his work. Instead, his poems constitute a denial of the depth model either of the mind or the literary text. Unlike prior avant-garde poets, Ashbery may claim to be truly “postmodern” in the sense that his work never appears to rely on an extratextual source of wisdom.