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Dickinson, Plath and the ballooning tradition of American poetry

Dickinson, Plath and the ballooning tradition of American poetry
Dickinson, Plath and the ballooning tradition of American poetry
This chapter explores the local and national renditions of ballooning in poems by and Sylvia Plath. It proceeds, in part, on the understanding that balloons mentioned in one poem by Plath or Dickinson might catch the drift of another. Yet, determining the scope of an image's wider cultural context can be more arbitrary: Miller notes it is It is telling that Miller uses Anglo-American Romanticism as his example of a constraining "local" context: Both Plath and Dickinson treat their literary antecedents as unexpected arrivals from the air. Within the context of American poetry, we might read it as a sly rebuttal to Emerson's "transparent eyeball": The globular wonder of the poet is also his or her undoing. The spectacle of female self-immolation links Dickinson's poem to Sylvia Plath's "Balloons", written a century later. Yet, whether or not we read this as Plath's final poem, it carries its own difficult offer of a teleological reading.
978-1-13-890389-0
9-34
Routledge
May, William
f41afa4c-1ccc-4ac6-83b6-9f5d9aad0f67
Stubbs, Tara
Haynes, Doug
May, William
f41afa4c-1ccc-4ac6-83b6-9f5d9aad0f67
Stubbs, Tara
Haynes, Doug

May, William (2017) Dickinson, Plath and the ballooning tradition of American poetry. In, Stubbs, Tara and Haynes, Doug (eds.) Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture. (Routledge transnational perspectives on American literature, 28) New York ; Abingdon. Routledge, pp. 9-34. (doi:10.4324/9781315696607).

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Abstract

This chapter explores the local and national renditions of ballooning in poems by and Sylvia Plath. It proceeds, in part, on the understanding that balloons mentioned in one poem by Plath or Dickinson might catch the drift of another. Yet, determining the scope of an image's wider cultural context can be more arbitrary: Miller notes it is It is telling that Miller uses Anglo-American Romanticism as his example of a constraining "local" context: Both Plath and Dickinson treat their literary antecedents as unexpected arrivals from the air. Within the context of American poetry, we might read it as a sly rebuttal to Emerson's "transparent eyeball": The globular wonder of the poet is also his or her undoing. The spectacle of female self-immolation links Dickinson's poem to Sylvia Plath's "Balloons", written a century later. Yet, whether or not we read this as Plath's final poem, it carries its own difficult offer of a teleological reading.

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Published date: 1 March 2017
Organisations: English

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Local EPrints ID: 377046
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/377046
ISBN: 978-1-13-890389-0
PURE UUID: df55d5f5-6dbd-4570-abd9-2cfd10e3aa52

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Date deposited: 21 May 2015 13:32
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 19:55

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Contributors

Author: William May
Editor: Tara Stubbs
Editor: Doug Haynes

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