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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Center Of All Beauty: Radical Democracy, Materiality, And The Poetic Subject In Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Marcus Merritt
The Center Of All Beauty: Radical Democracy, Materiality, And The Poetic Subject In Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Marcus Merritt
Wayne State University Dissertations
In The Center of All Beauty, I trace a strain of poetics in twentieth-century American poetry from William Carlos Williams through Frank O’Hara, Alice Notley, and Amiri Baraka. This poetics is founded in a radically democratic conception of the poetic subject and in the use of poetry as a tool for developing critical knowledge about the material conditions within which the poetic subject is constituted. In Spring and All and The Embodiment of Knowledge, Williams articulates a poetics that denies the authority of any grounds upon which any poetic subject would be considered inadequate to poetic speech and outlines a …