Word: williamsons
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...many supporters, on the other hand, say that the organization has become a scapegoat for reckless spending in Third World countries. All it is doing, they contend, is calling for needed economic reforms, without which many countries would be financially paralyzed. Says John Williamson, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington: "Right now the fund is more harsh than is desirable, but it is not clear that it has an alternative...
Poetic technique, however, is difficult to pin down. Lowell's language sometimes becomes clunky and almost anti-lyrical. But Williamson argues that this quality mirrors a disintegration of consciousness--or, more appropriately, a new realization of the discontinuities of consciousness. It is refreshing that Williamson distinguishes between the deliberate use of anti-lyricism as a technique and the recurrent inattention to poetic technique that characterizes the poets of bad surrealism. Clumsy diction can illustrate the disintegration of consciousness and some poets even use language as a weapon against itself, as James Wright, Galway Kinnell, and Robert Bly do at times...
...series of essays on selected poets, Williamson does just this. The personal poet, he argues, enacts a ritual of sorts through his poetry. The poet begins with an objective shaping of the self, then, after an almost narcissistic immersion, begins to experience the self as an external object. He finally transcends his isolation by projecting himself outwards, at the same time engaging the reader in the transformation. Lapses in personal poetry, then, can be either failures at any step of this ritual--such as the unquestioning immersion in narcissism which leads to psychic laundry lists--or simple failures of poetic...
...Williamson is freshest when he writes about his contemporaries-- Louise Gluck, Richard Tillinghast, Diane Wakoski, Frank Bidart, James McMichael, Robert Pinsky, and Allen Grossman. Each of these poets has confronted the same problems that Williamson's book addresses, and Williamson's refusal to apply premature classifications is the beginning of a fair critical treatment of these poets. It is here that he addresses the complexity of each post's private images and the value of irony...
...Williamson's analysis would be sharper if it emphasized irony more. Contemporary critics take poetry for too seriously; this tendency has hastened poetry's tragic descent into obscurity, away from mainstream culture. Williamson praises Tillinghast's early poetry for its gentle irony, a quality which that poet has refined to great advantage in his more recent work. But he almost completely ignores the wonderful humor in most of Plath's poetry--a humor that saves her poetry from becoming an obsessive mythology of self-hatred. A sense of playfulness is the crucial element lacking in much personal poetry as well...