BOOK NEWS: The influence of architecture on 20th century American poetry

Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination: The Harmony of Forms

BY JO GILL

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780198868347

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/modern-american-poetry-and-the-architectural-imagination-9780198868347?cc=us&lang=en

Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination: The Harmony of Forms assesses the relationship between architectural and poetic innovation in the United States across the twentieth century. Taking the work of five key poets as case studies and drawing on the work of a rich range of other writers, architects, artists, and commentators, this study proposes that by examining the sustained and productive--if hitherto overlooked--engagement between the two disciplines, we enrich our understanding of the complexity and interrelationship of both.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The book begins by tracing the rise of what was conceived of as "modern" (and often "international style") architecture and by showing how poetry and architecture in the early decades of the century developed in dialogue, and within a shared, and often transnational, context. It then moves on to examine the material, aesthetic, and social conditions that helped shape both disciplines, offering new readings of familiar poems and bringing other pertinent resources to light. It considers the uses to which poets of the period put the insights of architecture--and vice versa. In closing, Gill turns to modern and contemporary architects' written accounts of their own practice, in memoirs and other commentaries, and examines how they have assimilated, or resisted, the practice and vision of poetry.

• Expands our understanding of poetry and place; poetry and the city; poetry and the arts
• Covers a range of familiar poets including Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, Frank O'Hara and Wallace Stevens and others who are less widely studied
• Brings architectural and poetic theory, practice, and debates together in unexpected and productive ways
• Opens up the field of twentieth-century American poetry to new interpretations
• Features unpublished archival research

Jo Gill is vice-principal and head of the College of Arts at the University of Glasgow. She specializes in mid-century American literature and culture and has published widely on writers including Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks.