The shape, lineation, and prosody of postmodern poems are extravagantly
inventive, imbuing both form and content with meaning. Through a survey
of American poetry and poetics from the end of World War II to the
present, Michael Golston traces the proliferation of these experiments
to a growing fascination with allegory in philosophy, linguistics,
critical theory, and aesthetics, introducing new strategies for reading
American poetry while embedding its formal innovations within the
history of intellectual thought.
Beginning with Walter Benjamin's explicit understanding of Surrealism as
an allegorical art, Golston defines a distinct engagement with allegory
among philosophers, theorists, and critics from 1950 to today. Reading
Fredric Jameson, Angus Fletcher, Roland Barthes, and Craig Owens, and
working with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Pierce, Golston develops a
theory of allegory he then applies to the poems of Louis Zukofsky and
Lorine Niedecker, who, he argues, wrote in response to the Surrealists;
the poems of John Ashbery and Clark Coolidge, who incorporated formal
aspects of filmmaking and photography into their work; the
groundbreaking configurations of P. Inman, Lyn Hejinian, Myung Mi Kim,
and the Language poets; Susan Howe's "Pierce-Arrow," which he submits to
semiotic analysis; and the innovations of Craig Dworkin and the
conceptualists. Revitalizing what many consider to be a staid rhetorical
trope, Golston positions allegory as a creative catalyst behind American
poetry's postwar avant-garde achievements.
