The 'Winter Mind'

William Bronk and American Letters

This first full-length study of William Bronk, one of our most important contemporary poets and essayists, locates his work in relation to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England literary tradition, to later twentieth-century modernism, and to the subsequent Objectivist and Black Mountain schools of poetry. Through special attention to his uniquely elegant style, this study demonstrates how Bronk has brought together earlier American poetics and philosophy with modern and postmodern notions of being, emptiness, and nothingness.

This book features extensive discussions of Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens, as well as of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Cid Corman, and George Oppen. As particularly concerns these twentieth-century figures, Burt Kimmelman also sheds light on the role in their thinking and poetics played by post-positivist science especially its theories of relativity and uncertainty.

Analyses of exchanges of letters, most critically between Oppen and Bronk, disclose the great influence of their writing of contemporary intellectual currents aside from poetry itself. Kimmelmans discussion of epistemology is central to understanding this subtle and at times complex poet. The book explains ultimately how, as Michael Heller observes, 'Bronk is, in some sense, a reshaper of an American transcendental tradition, a strong poet of paradoxicality and worldlessness.' Discussions of solitude and abnegation, two key ideas Bronk derives from Thoreau and Melville, reveal not only the roots of Bronks concepts of being, emptiness, and nothingness, but also essential aspects of late-twentieth-century philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics anticipated by Bronk, Borman, Creeley, Olson, Oppen, and others over half a century ago.

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