This book explores the changing perception of time and space in avant-garde, modernist, and contemporary poetry. The author characterizes the works of modern Russian, French, and Anglo-American poets based on their attitudes towards reality, time, space, and history revealed in their poetics. The author compares the work of major Russian innovative poets Osip Mandelstam, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Joseph Brodsky with that of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and, in spite of the postmodernist “estrangement” of reality, the author proves that similar traces can be found in the work of contemporary American poets John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein. Both affinities and drastic differences are revealed in the poets’ attitudes towards time-space, reality, and history.
Price: $119.00
Pages: 300
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Imprint: Academic Studies Press
Series: Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy
Publication Date:
31 July 2017
Trim Size: 9.21 X 6.14 in
ISBN: 9781618116260
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
Literary studies: poetry and poets
“Ian Probstein’s magisterial study of the aesthetics of time in modernist and contemporary poetry offers illuminating exegeses of touchstone poems by Mandelstam, Eliot, Khlebnikov, Yeats, Pound, Brodsky, and Ashbery, among others. With the dialectical force of a ‘feast of citations,’ The River of Time brilliantly interweaves Russian and American poetry.”
— Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania, Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Ian Probstein is associate professor of English at Touro College. He has published ten books of poetry, translated more than a dozen poetry volumes; and has compiled and edited more than thirty books and anthologies of poetry in translation.
Introduction. Forms of Time-Space (Chronotope) in Poetry
Part One. Beyond Barriers: Avant-Gardе and Futurism
1. Forms of Chronotope in Avant-Garde Poetry
2. “The King of Time” and “The Slave of Time”: Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky
Part Two. Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Osip Mandelstam, W. B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound
1. Nature and “The Artifice of Eternity”: The Relation to Nature and Reality for Yeats, Pound, and Mandelstam
2. “Sailing to Byzantium”—“Sailing after Knowledge”: Byzantium as a Symbol of Cultural Heritage in Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound
3. Fear and Awe: Osip Mandelstam’s “The Slate Ode”
Part Three. T. S. Eliot: “Liberation from the Future as Well as the Past”
1. The Waste Land as a Human Drama Revealed by Eliot’s Dialogic Imagination
2. “Liberation from the Future as well as the Past”: Time-Space and History in Four Quartets
Part Four. Joseph Brodsky: “The River of Time” or “What Gets Left of a Man”
Part Five. John Ashbery: “Time Is an Emulsion”
Part Six. Charles Bernstein: “Of Time and the Line”
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Index
