Language and “the Things That Are There”: Paul de Man’s “Poetic Attitudes” Applied to Post-WWII American Poetry
Language and “the Things That Are There”: Paul de Man’s “Poetic Attitudes” Applied to Post-WWII American Poetry

Summary/Abstract: In his essay “Process and Poetry” (1956), Paul de Man identifies two types of “poetic attitude,” a poetry of process and a poetry of substance. Where de Man illuminates these attitudes by focusing on the content rather than the form of poems written by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin, this essay will apply these attitudes to post-war American poets while expanding de Man’s consideration to include elements of prosody and their relationship to “process” and “substance.” The purpose of this essay is to argue for the applicability of these attitudes to American poets of the era and further to argue that such a critical approach offers fresh views of this work. There are clear examples of de Man’s attitudes in poetry written in the US since 1945, and these are reflected in the dominant critical model of this poetry as divided between avant-garde and academic styles. By examining the free verse poetry in Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry (1960), and the formal poetry in Robert Pack, Louis Simpson and Donald Hall’s anthology New Poets of England and America (1957), this essay will identify poems that exemplify each of de Man’s attitudes, before taking into account the Language poetry of the 1970s as a development in American poetry of process. Finally, the essay shall identify a poet who, as de Man argues for Hölderlin, has found “accomplishment” by synthesizing process and substance, writing what have recently been termed “hybrid” poems.

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