The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry: Local Tongues in Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton argues that local speech became a central facet of English-language poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. It is based on a key observation about four major poets from both sides of the Atlantic: Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Harrison, and Lucille Clifton all respond to societal crises by arranging, reproducing, and reconceiving their particular versions of local speech in poetic form. The book's overarching claim is that local tongues in poetry have the capacity to bridge aesthetic and sociopolitical realms because nonstandard local speech declares its distinction from the status quo and binds people who have been subordinated by hierarchical social conditions, while harnessing those versions of speech into poetic structures can actively counter the very hierarchies that would degrade those languages. The diverse local tongues of these fourpoets marshaled into the forms of poetry situate them at once in literary tradition, in local contexts, and in prevailing social constructs.

Focuses on four major poets and their widely anthologized poems Argues that local speech is an elemental transnational facet of twentieth-century poetry Situates poems in literary tradition, in local contexts, and in prevailing social constructs

Autorentext
William Fogarty is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Central Florida, USA.

Inhalt
Chapter 1: Introduction: Local Tongues.- Chapter 2: Troubled Tongues: Seamus Heaney and the Political Poetics of Speech.- Chapter 3: The Gwendolynian Tongue: Gwendolyn Brooks's Noncolloquial Local Speech.- Chapter 4: Tongue-Tied Fighting: Tony Harrison's Linguistic Divisions.- Chapter 5: Mortal Tongues: Lucille Clifton's Local-Speech Admonitions.- Chapter 6: Coda: The Twenty-First Century Local-Speech Poem.