The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990 (Refiguring English Studies)

Oscillating between documentary and polemic, The Americans Poetry Wax Museum is a study of the canonizing assumptions and obsessions that animate postwar American poetry. Highly public literary controversies, such as the Pound affair of 1949, or the anthology wars of the early 1960s, are chronicled in a precise, detailed, and theoretically inflected account that redefines the project of literary history. Rasula's analysis moves from the rise of New Criticism, through the ascendancy of Robert Lowell and confessional poetics, into the current period of multiculturalism and the avant-garde provocations of the language poets. Drawing upon an impressive array of sources - ranging from the history of museum display to the institutional and cultural processes by which American poets have been canonized - Rasula combines literary criticism, cultural studies, and social history in an analysis that works to disrupt prevailing myths about poets and poetry in the public sphere and in the academy. This innovative and irreverent book, second in NCTE's Prefiguring English Studies series, will be an important resource not only for scholars of the period but for writers and teachers of poetry as well. It stands as an invitation for all of us to consider what it means to assemble and police a national canon of poetry.