Category: Literary Criticism

Poetry and Literary Criticism

by Steven M. Critelli March 15, 2016 1
Literary Criticism

A.R. Ammons – “Cascadilla Falls”

The poem exerts a magnetic attraction, largely due to its lyric intensity and the unpredictable development of its content: from a pastoral setting on Cornell’s campus in Upstate New York (where the “single creek” featured in the poem cuts through the Cascadilla gorge), to the capaciousness of its scientific quantifications of the cosmos and the apparent awe inspired by the poet’s realization of his place in the universal scheme, and finally to the surprising lament at the end of the poem.

by Steven M. Critelli February 2, 2016 Number of comments0
Literary Criticism

Notes on Ange Mlinko’s “Cottonmouth”

I was intrigued by Ange Mlinko’s newest published poem, “Cottonmouth” (Poetry Feb. 2016), a dense linguistic tour de force that weds the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with a locus in the contemporary American landscape, using stacks of cultural references like sampled sounds and playing them against an urban rap rhythm, then overlaying that with a verse form that invokes Virgil and Dante as it might have been imagined by James Joyce.

by Steven M. Critelli March 5, 2015 Number of comments0
Literary Criticism

Excerpt from “Reading Alice Fulton’s Barely Composed” – Essay on “Triptych for Topological Heart”

 Fulton leverages this episteme in the sonnet trio, “Triptych for Topological Heart,” to illustrate Western culture’s transition from classical religious dogma to new age secularism. The scientific theory of “topological psychology” describes the plasticity of human behavior and its propensity to adapt itself to a given environment. A significant part of this adaptation is the dominating role of concrete science over the increasingly subsidiary position of the closed-loop systems of myth and ideology.

by Steven M. Critelli February 14, 2014 Number of comments0
Literary Criticism

A Note About Meaning

Meaning is what an audience tries to give art when the medium itself is ineffable. Poems like T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land ” and John Berryman’s “The Dream Songs” are accepted today as having a discernible content and an interpretable discourse. But history tells us that the vast majority of critical readers didn’t know what to make of these poems until many years later when critical opinion eventually coalesced and pronounced their themes and method of discourse.