Background
Poirier, Richard was born on September 9, 1925 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, United States. Son of Philip and Annie (Kiley) Poirier.
(The work of American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) aspire...)
The work of American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) aspired to be accessible and colloquial. Instead of looking to Europe for inspiration, as did some of his contemoraries, Frost aimed to develop an authentic voice, with the rhythms and vocabulary of everyday American speech.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804717427/?tag=2022091-20
( Richard Poirier’s A World Elsewhere, originally publish...)
Richard Poirier’s A World Elsewhere, originally published in 1966 by the Oxford University Press, is a signal book in American literature and literary history. Widely acclaimed upon publication, it has since taken its place among a handful of books considered mandatory reading for all students and scholars in the field. Poirier’s classic work, hailed both for its original thesis and for its stylistic elegance and clarity, is once again made available in this new Wisconsin paperback edition.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0299099342/?tag=2022091-20
(First edition. A challenge to modernist and post-modernis...)
First edition. A challenge to modernist and post-modernist literary criticism. Chapters on The Question of Genius, Modernism and its Difficulties, Resistance in Itself, and Writing Off the Self, or How Would You Like to Disappear? x , 244, 2 pages. cloth, dust jacket. small 8vo..
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394501403/?tag=2022091-20
(Richard Poirier, one of America's most eminent critics, r...)
Richard Poirier, one of America's most eminent critics, reveals in this book the creative but mostly hidden alliance between American pragmatism and American poetry. He brilliantly traces pragmatism as a philosophical and literary practice grounded in a linguistic skepticism that runs from Emerson and William James to the work of Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens, and on to the cultural debates of today. More powerfully than ever before, Poirier shows that pragmatism had its start in Emerson, the great example to all his successors of how it is possible to redeem even as you set out to change the literature of the past. Poirier demonstrates that Emerson--and later William James--were essentially philosophers of language, and that it is language that embodies our cultural past, an inheritance to be struggled with, and transformed, before being handed on to future generations. He maintains that in Emersonian pragmatist writing, any loss--personal or cultural--gives way to a quest for what he calls "superfluousness, " a kind of rhetorical excess by which powerfully creative individuals try to elude deprivation and stasis. In a wide-ranging meditation on what James called "the vague, " Poirier extols the authentic voice of individualism, which, he argues, is tentative and casual rather than aggressive and dogmatic. The concluding chapters describe the possibilities for criticism created by this radically different understanding of reading and writing, which are nothing less than a reinvention of literary tradition itself. Poirier's discovery of this tradition illuminates the work of many of the most important figures in American philosophy and poetry. His reanimation ofpragmatism also calls for a redirection of contemporary criticism, so that readers inside as well as outside the academy can begin to respond to poetic language as the source of meaning, not to meaning as the source of language.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674679911/?tag=2022091-20
literary critic English educator
Poirier, Richard was born on September 9, 1925 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, United States. Son of Philip and Annie (Kiley) Poirier.
Bachelor of Arts, Amherst College, 1949; Master of Arts, Yale University, 1951; Doctor of Philosophy, Harvard University, 1959; student, University Paris, France, 1944-1945; Doctor of Humanities, Amherst College, 1978.
Member of faculty, Williams College, 1950-1952;
member of faculty, Harvard University, 1953-1963;
Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University, since 1963. Board directors, co-founder, Chairman of the Board Library. of America. Beckman professor University of California, Berkeley, 1973.
Chairman advisory English committee Harvard University, 1988-1991. Delivered Gauss Seminars, Princeton University, 1990, Thomas Stearns Eliot lectures, U. Kent, 1991, Henry James lectures, New York University, 1992.
(Richard Poirier, one of America's most eminent critics, r...)
( Richard Poirier’s A World Elsewhere, originally publish...)
(This novels of American author Henry James are famous for...)
(The work of American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) aspire...)
(Includes chapters on lyric and narrative poetry, Shakespe...)
(First edition. A challenge to modernist and post-modernis...)
( . )
( . )
Served with Army of the United States, 1943-1946. Member American Academy Arts and Sciences, American Academy Arts and Letters, P.E.N. (executive board 1986), PMLA (editorial board 1977-1979), nominating committee National Medal for Literature, 1986, 87, National Book Critics Circuit, 1977-1985, Century Club. Clubs: Century.