As a tradition modernism has fostered particularly polarised impulses -
though the great modernist poems offer impressive models, modernist
principles, epitomised in Ezra Pound's exhortation to 'make it new',
encourage poets to reject the methods of their immediate predecessors.
Re-making it New explores the impact of this polarised tradition on
contemporary American poets by examining the careers of John Ashbery,
Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Creeley and James Merrill. To demonstrate how
these four have extended modernist attitudes to create a distinctive
post-modern art, each one's poetry is compared with that of a modernist
who has been an important influence: Ashbery is discussed in conjunction
with Wallace Stevens, Bishop with Marianne Moore, Creeley with William
Carlos Williams and Merrill with W. H. Auden. Lynn Keller's book shows
that contemporary poets have chosen not to reach for order as their
modernist predecessors did; instead, they attempt to dissolve
hierarchical distinction and polarising categories in a modest spirit of
accommodation and acceptance.