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Alimentary poetics: Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg

  • Frank Kearful

Date Published:

6 Jan, 2013

Abstract:

Robert Lowell coined the famous distinction between cooked and raw poetry, but beginning with Joel Barlow's epic treat The Hasty Pudding there is a long tradition of American poetics sustained by copious and artful use of tropes of hunger, food, and eating. Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems and Lowell's Life Studies would be emaciated beyond recognition without them. Also taking other poems into account, the essay argues that Lowell and Ginsberg did more to enrich the American alimentary poetic tradition than anyone else since T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. 

 

Frank Kearful is Professor of English at Bonn University, where he has taught since 1974. He has been a visiting professor at Tübingen University and Hamburg University, and before moving to Germany in 1972 he was an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He has written numerous articles on twentieth-century American poetry, is editor of The Robert Lowell Newsletter, and since 2003 he has written the annual chapter on American poetry since the 1940s for American Literary Scholarship.

 

Updated July 29, 2011

 

Publisher's Version

Volume 11, Issue 2 Topoi
Last updated on 04/15/2020