Mode I':The problem of Nature

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Mode I.The problem of Nature
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What is the problem of nature?
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Robert Hass

• Born in California
• Relatively angst free life in Bay Area.
• Won Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1973.
• Then won prizes like National Book Critics Circle
  Award for Sun Under Wood.
• Was Poet Laureate of United States

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Hass aesthetic

• Poet of fullness, meditation, nature
• Not part of a school.
• Influenced by Japanese poets like Basho Busson
  and Issa.

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Elizabeth Bishop

• Born in Worcester, Massachusetts.
• Orphaned, lived with grandparents in Canada
• Became friends with Marianne Moore at Vassar
• Then traveled to Brazil where she lived for many
  years
• Eventually moved home to the States
• Taught at Harvard, NYU, MIT

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Bishops aesthetic

• Preoccupied with the idea of reticence
• Ekphrasis
• Natural subjects
• Clear diction
• sprezzatura

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Wallace Stevens

• Modernist who lived well into his 70s
• Worked most of his life for the insurance company
  the Hartford
• Traveled into NYC to look at modernist art and
  read a lot of philosophy
• First book published when he was in his forties,
  Harmonium.

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Stevens aesthetic

• Meditative, philosophical,
• hinged between the real world and the life of the
  mind and imagination
• Clear diction, no traditional meters, highly
  symbolic at times

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William Stafford

• Born in Kansas in 1914.
• Educated in Great Plains states.
• Conscientious objector during WWII.
• Also published first book in late 40s.
• Taught and traveled widely
• Was Consultant of Library of Congress (poet
  laureate)

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Staffords aesthetic

• Gentle, mystical, half-mocking, half-daydreaming
  lyric-narratives.
• His most often quoted advice to writers, Lower
  your standards
• Likened to Frost and consequently to B.R. because
  of his plain diction and attention to landscape
  and nature

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John Ashbery

• Born in Rochester, New York in 1928.
• Raised near Ontario
• Brother died when they were children
• Attended Harvard and Columbia
• Met up with other New York School poets while in
  New York City
• Translator of French pulp and became an art
  critic

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Ashberys aesthetic

• disjunctive syntax
• Witty wordplay
• a prosaic, sometimes flat or parodic tone
• Writes about the mind, and his poems imitate how
  the mind moves (non-linearly).
• Once said his goal was to write a poem a critic
  could not even talk about.

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