Background
Marks, Emerson R. was born on October 13, 1918 in New York City. Son of Montague and Ann Elizabeth Marks.
( What is the nature of poetic language? This topic has...)
What is the nature of poetic language? This topic has been the subject of debate among scholars, poets, and critics for centuries, and continues to be a notoriously thorny issue today. Taming the Chaos trace this subject, for the first time, from the Renaissance through the present in chapters on Elizabethan times, Neoclassicism, Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Romantic and Victorian periods, Matthew Arnold, Pater, Eliot, and others. In an effort to define the mysterious and attractive power of poetic discourse, Emerson R. Marks undertakes a comparative evaluative exposition of successive attempts to explain the phenomenon. He presents these attempts chronologically, and then distills crucial and therefore recurrent themes. Underlying them all is the intractable nature of poetry's verbal substance. Alone among artists, poets are at once blessed and burdened by the inherent semantic component and the tarnishing social employment of their linguistic medium. This dilemma has from the first spawned subsidiary questions. Is the value of meter hedonic, semantically functional, or both? Was metrical form primeval in origin, and thus essential to poetry, or only a later technical refinement of a primitive rhythmic impulse, and thus dispensable? While considering these questions, Marks confronts the issues of poetic prose and free verse, and asks in what respects the criteria governing verse style are referable to the poet's long proclaimed moral and social position. Marks provides evidence that the central aesthetic innovation produced by the Romantic revolution, the concept of organic artistic form, effected radical reformulations of such issues that were especially fruitful for poetic diction theory. The Wordsworth-Coleridge debate on the question, near the dawn of English literary Romanticism, remains the point d'appui for all subsequent theoretical refinements through the present. This debate culminates most notably in the modern treatment of the enigma of poetic meaning. The closing chapter of the book examines the penetrating exploration of this key question that constitutes T. S. Eliot's crowning achievement in critical theory. A long-lasting and ambitious study of poetic language, Taming the Chaos examines the main attempts by critics since the Renaissance to elucidate the crucial problem of poetic language.
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Marks, Emerson R. was born on October 13, 1918 in New York City. Son of Montague and Ann Elizabeth Marks.
Bachelor, City College of New York, 1940. Master of Arts, State University Iowa, 1942. Doctor of Philosophy, New York University, 1953.
English professor Rutgers University, Newark, 1946-1956, New York University, summer 1956, Wayne State University, Detroit, 1956-1969. Fulbright lecturer University Montpelier, France, 1964-1965. English professor University Massachusetts, Boston, 1969-1985, professor emeritus, from 1985.
( What is the nature of poetic language? This topic has...)
( The Description for this book, Coleridge on the Languag...)
Warden St. Bede's Church, Newton, Massachusetts, 1995-1998. 1st lieutenant United States Army, 1942-1946. Member American Society Aethetics, Association Literature Critics and Scholars.
Married Mary Seward Wall, October 9, 1943. Children: Emerson R. Junior, Anne.