Stafford, William (Edgar) - Lawrence Kramer
LAWRENCE KRAMER
[A] radical faith in the power of language to implicate reality has been the religion of American poetry for at least a century…. [Recently] the American poet's trust in language has shown itself as a "letting go" of what seem to be the recognized constraints of writing: a release of potentialities that are latent in the language one sets down. This letting go produces a text that half seems to write itself, or that can be trusted to write itself in a way that dissolves or blurs the boundaries between language and its referents. The poet's role in this process is to originate it and give it contour: to let his language speak through him, as if he were a kind of modern Ion, inspired not by divine madness but by the intrinsic sanity of the word. (pp. 101-02)
As [John Ashbery, A. R. Ammons, and W. S. Merwin] show, there is no central or privileged form for the American poet's trust in language. One kind of trust, however, does seem to show...
[The entire page is 1286 words long]
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