Radical as Reality

"What do American poets mean when they talk about "freedom"? Freedom from what, or the freedom to do what? And how does form, as an aesthetic choice, dramatize certain fundamental questions, such as what shapes we want to give to our poetic lives, how much power we actually have to choose those shapes, and what, exactly, do we even mean by "we"? The former editor of Literary Imagination here collects his thoughts on the last one hundred years of American poetry, the poems he finds to be the most awe-inspiring, the most surprising and inevitable, and the ones built to endure. Peter Campion challenges facile, received notions and shows us an American poetic landscape more subtle and varied than most critics have allowed. The book is also about poetic making, whether out of the tensions between personal and communal experience, or an effort to reinvent the art by combining epic and lyric precedents, or, finally, as a negotiation between the pull of convention and the desire for individual expression, between abstract formal energies and the ever-thickening texture of our shared global social experience"--