Download or read book Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry written by Charles Altieri and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry concentrates on the challenges posed to poetry by modernist painting: how could the poets adapt to the painters' abilities to recast our understanding of the psyche's needs, powers, and social dependencies, and how could they share the painters' efforts to find alternatives to what seemed the inescapably ideological grounds for all value claims? By stressing the poets' ways of making the syntax of artworks carry semantic force, this orientation generates a much more dynamic, philosophically stimulating sense of modernist poetry than the ones offered by the dominant styles of political critique.