Description:
Challenges the conventional critical reading of the American poetic project as an engagement with or reaction against Emersonian thought. Rowe demonstrates how ideals of individualism, intellectualism, and otherworldiness inevitably undermine any political effectiveness that a writer may seek to achieve.
Review Quotes: Rowe's is a... provocative... important contribution both to literary history's methodology and to understanding the individual writers and the works he examines and discusses in detail.-- "Choice"