THE POETICS OF IMMANENCE AND EXPERIENCE - THE CASE OF ROBERT LOWELL
Research Article
THE POETICS OF IMMANENCE AND EXPERIENCE - THE CASE OF ROBERT LOWELL
ABSTRACT
The paper demonstrates the inception of a poetic model I define as the poetics of immanence and
experience in Lowell’s poetry written during the late 1950s, which I argue marked American
poetry’s shift away from Modernism and its prevalent metaphoric and symbolic patterns. An
analysis of a poem by W.B. Yeats (“The Second Coming”) and one of Lowell’s “life studies”
(“Commander Lowell”), make the contrast between these two poetic models visible. I further
define the concept of immanence as a structure-generating principle which presupposes the
presence of a human consciousness as an individuated and immanent “I” in the poem, pointing at
two essential forms of immanence in Lowell’s poetry: (i) the immanence of a lived experience,
which occurs when the poet presents the full structure of an experience with precise and concrete
details through the voice in the poem and (ii) the narrator’s immanence, which occurs when the
narrator narrates himself through the selections of material and becomes the agent of the
experience. Thus, the concept of immanence, this paper argues, materializes and produces an
artistic effect, a simulacrum of a lived experience and a concrete, personalized immanent narrator.
DAVIDOVSKA, L.,
(2020). THE POETICS OF IMMANENCE AND EXPERIENCE - THE CASE OF ROBERT LOWELL. International Journal of Education and Philology, 1(1), 40-46. Arrival Date Posted By:https://ijep.ibupress.com/articles/the-poetics-of-immanence-and-experience---the-case-of-robert-lowell
