Description
Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science is without question the best book on poetic rhythm. Measure lies at the heart of what makes poetry poetry-and perhaps this is why the topic has always excited such surprisingly heated controversy. Unlike most writers on the subject, however, Golston never looses his critical cool, and the result-both readable and rigorous-is an exemplary work of scholarship: astonishingly imaginative yet always firmly grounded in fact. By historicizing the idea of 'rhythm' itself, Golston recovers the ideology of rhythm at the heart of Modernism, in which politics and poetics cannot be disentangled. In the process, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science makes Modernist poetry-from Yeats to Pound to Williams-seem once again as strange and fascinating and inventive as ever. -- Craig Dworkin, associate professor of English, The University of Utah In his wide-ranging and meticulously researched study, Michael Golston reconstitutes a forgotten archive of Modernist concerns with the connections between rhythm and the human body shaped by nation, culture, and geography. The brilliantly argued chapters on Pound and Yeats show how these two central figures of Modernist poetry were influenced by Rhythmics and transformed it into a distinctively Modernist poetics that fused formal innovation with ideology. The fascinating concluding chapter on William Carlos Williams points the way to some of the contemporary poetic experiments with 'measure' that we have come to call postmodernist. Golston's innovative, interdisciplinary, and lucidly argued analysis changes the way in which we understand the relation of form and ideology in Modernist art and literature and opens up new areas of research for contemporary poetry. -- Ursula K. Heise, associate professor, English and comparative literature, Stanford University
About the Author
Michael Golston received his bachelor's degree from the University of New Mexico, his master's degree from the University of California, Berekeley, and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He currently lives in New York City, where he teaches twentieth-century poetry and poetics at Columbia University.
Reviews
This book deserves to change how we understand the place of rhythm in modernism. -- Leonard Diepeveen Modernism / Modernity
Awards
Winner of Louis Martz Prize 2008.
Book Information
ISBN 9780231142762
Author Michael Golston
Format Hardback
Page Count 296
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press