Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

The relationship between ethics, politics, and poetics is here examined by Wrighton, in the study of twentieth-century experimental American poetry. Relying upon the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Wrighton charts the development of ethical praxis in experimental work from the Objectivists of the 1920s, through to detailed analysis of the Black Mountain and Beat writers of the post-war era, and the post-Vietnam "Language" poets. The poetic projects engaged -- including work from Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Jerome Rothenberg, and Bruce Andrews -- are shown to be oppositional to the dominant political discourses of their time, re-imagining notions of democracy and community where an ontological abuse has been manifest in totalizing ideologies.