English 2060E Lecture Notes - Stephen Scobie, Dorothy Livesay, The Waste Land
Document Summary
Earlier long poems in the 18th and 19th centuries followed. European characteristics such as the heroic couplet, tended to be descriptive, narrative, and topographical, to tell stories. Margaret dickie traces the long poem"s critical heritage through modernism as a product of modernism"s public concerns we might think of. Eliot"s the waste land or stephen crane"s the bridge. These poems attempt to avoid the cult of personality in eliot"s terms to court a public muse. When canadian poets use autobiography, and they do, it"s not a matter of introspection or confession, but positioning the speaker in amongst cultural and historical fragments. Smaro kamboureli has argued that in some way the long poem is an anti-genre driven continually by its lack of definition and desire for it. Hutcheon"s articulation, we could argue that it uses and abuses other poetic forms in order to construct a form that resists coherence via definitive generic characteristics.
