Stephen Burt
Encyclopedia
Stephen Burt is a literary critic, poet, and a professor who teaches at Harvard University
.
" in a 1998 book review of Susan Wheeler's
book, Smokes, in Boston Review
magazine. This is how Burt defines the elliptical poet:
, an important elliptical poet, Burt also lists Liam Rector's
The Sorrow of Architecture (1984), Lucie Brock-Broido's
The Master Letters (1995), Mark Ford's Landlocked (1992), and Mark Levine's
debut, Debt (1993) as "some groundbreaking and definitively Elliptical books."
, Robert Creeley
, Gertrude Stein
, and George Oppen
. This is how Burt loosely defines "The New Thing" poets:
Poets, for whom Burt claims that "The New Thing" label fits, include Rae Armantrout
, Devin Johnston, Joseph Massey, Michael O'Brien
, Justin Marks
, Elizabeth Treadwell
, and Graham Foust
.
, Poetry Review, Slate
, The Times Literary Supplement
, the London Review of Books
, and the Yale Review
.
He has a signficant interest in the work of the poet/critic Randall Jarrell
, and Burt's book Randall Jarrell and His Age re-evaluates Jarrell's importance as a poet. The book won the Warren-Brooks Award
in 2002. In explaining the aim of his book, Burt wrote, "Many readers know Jarrell as the author of several anthology poems (for example, 'The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
'), a charming book or two for children, and a panoply of influential reviews. This book aims to illuminate a Jarrell more ambitious, more complex, and more important than that." In 2005, he also edited a book of Jarrell's critical essays, Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden
.
In addition to writing books about poets and poetry, Burt has published two books of his own poetry, Popular Music (1999), which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry, and Parallel Play (2006).
from Yale
in 2000 before joining the faculty at Macalester College
, his first academic post, from 2000-2007. Beginning in 2007, he joined the teaching staff at Harvard University where he became a tenured professor in 2010.
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
.
Elliptical Poetry
Burt received significant attention for coining the term "elliptical poetryElliptical poetry
Elliptical Poetry or ellipticism is a literary-critical term introduced by critic Stephen Burt in a 1998 essay in Boston Review on Susan Wheeler, and expanded upon in an eponymous essay in American Letters & Commentary...
" in a 1998 book review of Susan Wheeler's
Susan Wheeler
Susan Wheeler is an educator and award-winning poet whose poems have frequently appeared in anthologies. She currently teaches creative writing at Princeton University.Her published works include:...
book, Smokes, in Boston Review
Boston Review
Boston Review is a bimonthly American political and literary magazine. The magazine covers, specifically, political debates, literature, and poetry...
magazine. This is how Burt defines the elliptical poet:
Elliptical poets try to manifest a person-who speaks the poem and reflects the poet-while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves. They are post-avant-gardist, or post-"postmodern": they have read (most of them) Stein'sBurt also adds that Elliptical poets are "good at describing information overload." In addition to calling the subject of Burt's review, Susan WheelerGertrude SteinGertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
heirs, and the "language writers,"Language poetsThe Language poets are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s...
and have chosen to do otherwise. Elliptical poems shift drastically between low (or slangy) and high (or naively "poetic") diction. Some are lists of phrases beginning "I am an X, I am a Y." Ellipticism's favorite established poets are DickinsonEmily DickinsonEmily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life...
, BerrymanJohn BerrymanJohn Allyn Berryman was an American poet and scholar, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry...
, AshberyJohn AshberyJohn Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...
, and/or Auden. . .The poets tell almost-stories, or almost-obscured ones. They are sardonic, angered, defensively difficult, or desperate; they want to entertain as thoroughly as, but not to resemble, television.
Susan Wheeler
Susan Wheeler is an educator and award-winning poet whose poems have frequently appeared in anthologies. She currently teaches creative writing at Princeton University.Her published works include:...
, an important elliptical poet, Burt also lists Liam Rector's
Liam Rector
Liam Rector was an American poet, essayist and educator. He had administered literary programs at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs , the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, and the Folger Shakespeare Library...
The Sorrow of Architecture (1984), Lucie Brock-Broido's
Lucie Brock-Broido
Lucie Brock-Broido is the author of three collections of poetry. She has received many honors, including the Witter-Bynner prize of Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, the Harvard-Danforth Award for Distinction in Teaching, the Jerome J...
The Master Letters (1995), Mark Ford's Landlocked (1992), and Mark Levine's
Mark Levine (poet)
Mark Levine is an American poet and non-fiction writer.He grew up in Toronto, attended Brown University, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop....
debut, Debt (1993) as "some groundbreaking and definitively Elliptical books."
The New Thing
In 2009, Burt wrote an essay called "The New Things" in which he invented a new category of American contemporary poets that he calls "The New Thing." Burt explains that these poets derive their new style from the likes of William Carlos WilliamsWilliam Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
, Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...
, Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
, and George Oppen
George Oppen
George Oppen was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee...
. This is how Burt loosely defines "The New Thing" poets:
The poets of the New Thing observe scenes and people (not only, but also, themselves) with a self-subordinating concision, so much so that the term “minimalism” comes up in discussions of their work. . .The poets of the New Thing eschew sarcasm and tread lightly with ironies, and when they seem hard to pin down, it is because they leave space for interpretations to fit. . .The new poetry, the new thing, seeks, as WilliamsWilliam Carlos WilliamsWilliam Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
did, well-made, attentive, unornamented things. It is equally at home (as he was) in portraits and still lifes, in epigram and quoted speech; and it is at home (as he was not) in articulating sometimes harsh judgments, and in casting backward looks. The new poets pursue compression, compact description, humility, restricted diction, and—despite their frequent skepticism—fidelity to a material and social world. They follow Williams’s “demand,” as the critic Douglas Mao put it, “both that poetry be faithful to the thing represented and that it be a thing in itself.” They are so bound up with ideas of durable thinghood that we can name the tendency simply by capitalizing: the New Thing. . . Reference, brevity, self-restraint, attention outside the self, material objects as models, Williams and his heirs as predecessors, classical lyric and epigram as precedents: all these, together, constitute the New Thing.
Poets, for whom Burt claims that "The New Thing" label fits, include Rae Armantrout
Rae Armantrout
Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language Poets. Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California but grew up in San Diego. She has published ten books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies...
, Devin Johnston, Joseph Massey, Michael O'Brien
Michael O'Brien (American poet)
Michael O'Brien is an American poet.He began his poetry career as part of the "Eventorium", a relatively obscure group of New York artists with an interest in surrealism...
, Justin Marks
Justin Marks
Justin Marks is an American race car driver. He currently drives the #66 GoPro Chevrolet Silverado for Turn One Racing in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series.-Early years:...
, Elizabeth Treadwell
Elizabeth Treadwell
Elizabeth Treadwell is an American poet and fiction writer. Her works in prose include the novel The Queen of Cups and the story collection Populace...
, and Graham Foust
Graham Foust
Graham Foust is an American poet and currently is an associate professor at Saint Mary's College of California.-Early life:...
.
Writings
In addition to his notable essays for the Boston Review, Burt has also written for The New York Times Book ReviewThe New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Book Review is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. The offices are located near Times Square in New York...
, Poetry Review, Slate
Slate (magazine)
Slate is a US-based English language online current affairs and culture magazine created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. On 21 December 2004 it was purchased by the Washington Post Company...
, The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement is a weekly literary review published in London by News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation.-History:...
, the London Review of Books
London Review of Books
The London Review of Books is a fortnightly British magazine of literary and intellectual essays.-History:The LRB was founded in 1979, during the year-long lock-out at The Times, by publisher A...
, and the Yale Review
Yale Review
The Yale Review is the self-proclaimed oldest literary quarterly in the United States. It is published by Yale University.It was founded originally in 1819 as The Christian Spectator. At its origin it was published to support Evangelicalism, but over time began to publish more on history and...
.
He has a signficant interest in the work of the poet/critic Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a role which now holds the title of US Poet Laureate.-Life:Jarrell was a native of Nashville, Tennessee...
, and Burt's book Randall Jarrell and His Age re-evaluates Jarrell's importance as a poet. The book won the Warren-Brooks Award
Warren-Brooks Award
The Warren-Brooks Award for literary criticism was established to honor the innovative, critical interpretation of literature offered by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks to celebrate the continuation of such achievement...
in 2002. In explaining the aim of his book, Burt wrote, "Many readers know Jarrell as the author of several anthology poems (for example, 'The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner is a five-line poem by Randall Jarrell published in 1945. It is about the death of a gunner in a Sperry ball turret on a World War II American bomber aircraft.From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,...
'), a charming book or two for children, and a panoply of influential reviews. This book aims to illuminate a Jarrell more ambitious, more complex, and more important than that." In 2005, he also edited a book of Jarrell's critical essays, Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden , who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,The first definition of "Anglo-American" in the OED is: "Of, belonging to, or involving both England and America." See also the definition "English in origin or birth, American by settlement or citizenship" in See also...
.
In addition to writing books about poets and poetry, Burt has published two books of his own poetry, Popular Music (1999), which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry, and Parallel Play (2006).
Academic Career
He earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard and his Ph.D.Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
from Yale
YALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
in 2000 before joining the faculty at Macalester College
Macalester College
Macalester College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college located in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It was founded in 1874 as a Presbyterian-affiliated but nonsectarian college. Its first class entered September 15, 1885. The college is located on a campus in a historic residential neighborhood...
, his first academic post, from 2000-2007. Beginning in 2007, he joined the teaching staff at Harvard University where he became a tenured professor in 2010.