“I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America,” wrote Charles Olson at the beginning of Call Me Ishmael, his mythopoetic account of Melville’s Moby Dick. And Wallace Stevens, in “The American Sublime,” argued that in this country the sublime comes down to “the empty spirit / in vacant space.” In their accounts of American “space,” both poets were situating themselves within the native tradition of Romanticism associated with Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville and Hawthorne. Their interpretations of the American nineteenth-century have fed a small but vital poetic tradition, in which we might include, among others, Ed Dorn, Jack Spicer, Susan Howe, and Peter Gizzi. READ MORE
Circle’s Apprentice |
