The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American PoetIn The Tenth Muse, Albert Gelpi asks the hard questions about how poetry can take on for itself the problems of shaping American identities and argues that the conditions of American life and culture have pushed our major poets into a debate between intellect and passion. Gelpi provides thorough readings of major American poets from Bradstreet and Taylor up to the modernists, often using contemporary poets (Rich, Ginsberg, Duncan) as frames for those predecessors. Originally published in 1975 in hardcover only by Harvard University Press |
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Page 35
... sexual terms . He is , of course , working from a long tradition ; the great mystics and religious poets have always invoked sexual passion as the closest human analogue for the impossible but experienced union of opposites . But the sexual ...
... sexual terms . He is , of course , working from a long tradition ; the great mystics and religious poets have always invoked sexual passion as the closest human analogue for the impossible but experienced union of opposites . But the sexual ...
Page 197
... sexuality in the middle of a poem pro- claiming his newfound sexual self . Nor is this crisis surprising or inappropriate . Whitman's psyche is the ground of that poem's drama . It provides the matrix within which the ego , racked with ...
... sexuality in the middle of a poem pro- claiming his newfound sexual self . Nor is this crisis surprising or inappropriate . Whitman's psyche is the ground of that poem's drama . It provides the matrix within which the ego , racked with ...
Page 208
... sexual activity or habit any more than a more sexually polarized psyche would . A psychologically androgynous person could be continent or incontinent , faithful or faithless , hetero- sexual or homosexual or , for that matter , asexual ...
... sexual activity or habit any more than a more sexually polarized psyche would . A psychologically androgynous person could be continent or incontinent , faithful or faithless , hetero- sexual or homosexual or , for that matter , asexual ...
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Adrienne Rich American poets Anne Bradstreet archetype artist bard Beauty become body Bryant called Calvinist catalogues century Charles Olson Circumference consciousness critics death distinction divine dream edition Emily Dickinson Erich Neumann erotic Essays eternal experience expression Ezra Pound fact feminine genius heart Heaven human ideal identity imagery images imagination Incarnation individual language Leaves of Grass Letters lines literary live lover masculine matter Meditations metaphors metaphysical mind moon moral Muse mystery mystical nature Over-soul passage passion person Poe's poem poet's poetic poetry prophet Prose psyche psychic psychological Puritan Ralph Waldo Emerson religious rhyme rhythm Robert Frost Section sense sexual Song soul spirit stanza symbol T. S. Eliot thee things Thoreau thou tion Transcendental Transcendentalists types and tropes unconscious verse vision Waldo Emerson Wallace Stevens Walt Whitman Whitman William woman words writing York