Echoes and Moving Fields

Résumé du livre

During the past two decades few contemporary poets have received as much critical attention as W.S. Merwin and John Ashbery. This is true in part because these poets - in quite antithetical fashions - have insistently challenged rudimentary suppositions about signification and meaning. Echoes and Moving Fields considers Merwin's course from A Mask for Janus to The Rain in the Trees, commenting on the demands implicit in his use of stasis, primitivist grammar, and ellipses; it juxtaposes these predilections to the temporal progression, rhetorical play, and syntactical augmentations that mark Ashbery's poetry from Some Trees to A Wave. Drawing on oppositions inherent in the vertical and horizontal axes of language, Haworth Hoeppner uses structural, phenomenological, and deconstructive methods to assess the ideological impact of the various formal strategies that Merwin and Ashbery have employed. This study argues that poetic form provides a temporal score for perception. It demonstrates how Merwin constructs a synchronic field for language. Eventually committed to the notion that mythic concentration demands the ego lose itself in the object in the attempt to discover essence, Merwin aims at disembodiment. Haworth Hoeppner sets this practice against Ashbery's habit of diffusing the self in perception, a method that depends on reversals of figure and frame in order to contravene perspectival limitation.