Word: self
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Survival is the question. Most budding poets soon wilt and retire rather than risking sanity in a quixotic struggle to capture and liberate something in themselves. Those who continue probably have no choice. Ironically, that is the only way they can survive. Meanwhile, aspiring writers are stricken with self-doubt about writing. If, as Pound wrote, "The scientists are in terror/and the European mind stops," they wonder whether they shouldn't feel slightly embarrassed penning verse. Perhaps the class of 1910 could confidently strive for greatness, but the class of 1970 no longer knows what greatness...
...between 1910 and 1970 the dynamics of reading and writing have changed. Few people read habitually now-movies and T.V. provide a far more effortless escape to fill lonely nights. Reading literature is a form of active self-exploration. Unlike the movies, books demand immense concentration and visual inventiveness. There is a constant interplay between the page and wandering mind of the reader. Often he will look up entirely and lapse into a reverie suggested by the text. People read when they want to be alone with themselves, when they shun the social engineering of the media. In other words...
...Metaphors of a Cultural Radical. Unfortunately, this effort is also the least successful. Rosen's "metaphors" are confused and hackneyed: the revolution is a festival in which we are going to learn how to live a little better and make love to everyone and everything. Rosen is too self-conscious and experiential to be analytic and he doesn't seem to sense the depth of the things he writes about. To say "A growing disenchantment with this country among SoSers as well as Young Americans for Freedom, among a handful of Senators and a small number of administrators tells...
...welcome boredom ("you wish she would talk of something else") is Alan Williamson's careful analysis of Lowell's Notebook 1967-8. Like so many other contemporary writers Lowell has moved toward a merging of private and public theme that hinges on a more detached view of the self and more self-involved view of events...
...beautiful and moving, and perhaps more so than anything to come, it is over. Its present inhabitants should leave that legacy to the scholars whose critical voyeurism will no doubt make short work of it. In the meantime undergraduate writers need to banish the deadening cloud of fustian and self-importance that inevitably pervades literary-academic communities...