Characteristics of American Poetry critics

Question 1

William Meyer - difference between English Romantic poetry and new American style

Answer 1

The preceding English Romantic style characterised by the ‘hyperverbal’, American by the ‘hypervisual’ (which as anti-intellectual, prioritisation of the senses rather than the intelligence?)

Question 2

What did Randall Jarrell say is typical of American poets? (1969)

Answer 2

‘good American poets are surprisingly individual and independent’ rather than ‘member-of-the-Academy’ English poets

Question 3

What does Randall Jarrell suggest of modern poetry? (1940)

Answer 3

Its characteristics/emphases/perspectives are ‘essentially romantic’ - not a total reaction against Romanticism

Question 4

Bernard Duffey

Answer 4

Pre-Civil War poetry emphasised ‘coherence’ (“poetry was felt to be most itself…as it found images of reconciliation”); later c20th poetry emphasises ‘incoherence’ and ‘fragmented’ world with a sense of ‘contradiction between feeling and fact’