Overview
- Focuses on four major poets and their widely anthologized poems
- Argues that local speech is an elemental transnational facet of twentieth-century poetry
- Situates poems in literary tradition, in local contexts, and in prevailing social constructs
Part of the book series: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (MPCC)
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry: Local Tongues in Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton argues that local speech became a central facet of English-language poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. It is based on a key observation about four major poets from both sides of the Atlantic: Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Harrison, and Lucille Clifton all respond to societal crises by arranging, reproducing, and reconceiving their particular versions of local speech in poetic form. The book’s overarching claim is that “local tongues” in poetry have the capacity to bridge aesthetic and sociopolitical realms because nonstandard local speech declares its distinction from the status quo and binds people who have been subordinated by hierarchical social conditions, while harnessing those versions of speech into poetic structures can actively counter the very hierarchies that would degrade those languages. The diverse local tongues of these fourpoets marshaled into the forms of poetry situate them at once in literary tradition, in local contexts, and in prevailing social constructs.
Reviews
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
William Fogarty is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Central Florida, USA.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry
Book Subtitle: Local Tongues in Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton
Authors: William Fogarty
Series Title: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07889-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-07888-0Published: 31 July 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-07891-0Published: 01 August 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-07889-7Published: 30 July 2022
Series ISSN: 2634-6052
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6060
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 247
Number of Illustrations: 3 b/w illustrations
Topics: Poetry and Poetics, Contemporary Literature, Literature, general, Historical Linguistics, Historical Linguistics