One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America

Taking on one of the most crucial issues in American poetry of the last fifty years, celebrated poet Dan Chiasson explores what is lost or gained when real-life experiences are made part of the subject matter and source material for poetry. One Kind of Everything elucidates the uses of autobiographical fact and constructions of personhood in American poetry since World War II, with helpful reference to American literature in general since Emerson. Poetry styles in the United States, Chiasson shows, have become polarized in the last half century, characterized as excessively confessional on the one hand, and experimental and rigorously skeptical, on the other. In five extended, scholarly essays--on Robert Lowell's facts, which blur the identity of the people depicted in his poems; Elizabeth Bishop's masks, which confound any kind of personal disclosure to the reader; Frank Bidart's presence behind inherited texts; Frank O'Hara's chatty nonchalance that hides a deep interest in acts of memory; and Louise Glück's sincerity, which hinges on the reader's willingness to trust the lyric speaker--Chiasson looks specifically to bridge the chasm between formal and experimental poetry in the United States. Regardless of form, Chiasson argues that recent American poetry is most thoughtful when it engages most forcefully with autobiographic material, either in an effort to embrace it or denounce it.