Walks in the World

Representation and Experience in Modern American Poetry

Roger Gilbert

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780691602493, 9780691068589
• eBook ISBN: 9781400861699
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the twentieth century no form of experience has been more frequently taken up by poets eager to capture both the openness and fluidity of life and the aesthetic closure of an artwork than that of a walk. Examining the walk poem, Roger Gilbert contends that at its heart is the "desire to keep what we have lived." What is the appeal of the walk poem for modern American poets? According to Gilbert, it provides a ready-made frame within which to explore the full range of individual consciousness as it responds to and reflects on the world immediately at hand. The unstructured, plotless character of the walk allows poets to move freely from place to place, image to image, thought to thought. Suggesting that the walk poem strikes a compromise between the American obsession with process or movement and more traditionally mimetic concerns, Gilbert shows how it enables the poet to apprehend the world as horizon rather than landscape. Through perceptive and extended analyses of walk poems by Frost, Stevens, Williams, Roethke, Bishop, O'Hara, Snyder, Ammons, and Ashbery, he uncovers a spectrum of representational strategies for transforming passing experiences into the more lasting substance of poetry. Walks in the World addresses anyone who takes poetry seriously.

Originally published in 1991.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction A Walk is a Poem, A Poem is a Walk
• 1 Robert Frost: the Walk as Parable
• 2 Wallace Stevens: The Walk as Occasion
• 3 William Carlos Williams: The Walk as Music
• 4 Theodore Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop: The Walk as Revelation
• 5 Frank O'Hara and Gary Snyder: The Walk as Sample
• 6 A. R. Ammons and John Ashbery: The Walk as Thinking
• Conclusion The Walk and the World
• Epilogue Some Further Walks
• Notes
• Index