Beyond Maximus: The Construction of Public Voice in Black Mountain Poetry is the only study of Black Mountain poets (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Ed Dorn) to explain their association from the 1950s to their break-up after the Vietnam War. Dewey uses the poets' correspondence and other archival materials to illuminate their mutual influence and the crucial significance of "field poetics" to their careers. While previous criticism has focused on the poetics of the force field as a model of nature, Dewey understands the force field as a model of social force that all five poets articulate and incorporate into poetry in ways that compete with artistic craft. Their different conceptions of social force explain their divergent careers. The development of "field poetics" also sheds light on these poets' attempts to create an alliance between experimental poetics and public voice, a difficult agenda that speaks to Black Mountain poetry's crucial contribution to the artistic and political struggles of New American poetry.
About the author
Anne Day Dewey teaches English at Saint Louis University's Madrid Campus.
"Beyond Maximus is the most perceptive and informative analysis to date of the poets conventionally grouped under the label "Black Mountain." Virtually every page of the book opens up fresh and exciting ways of looking both at the works of these poets as individuals and at the relationships among the poets. We have here a book that makes a vitally important contribution to the critical study of twentieth-century American poetry."
—Burton Hatlen, University of Maine
"Dewey's Beyond Maximus is an impressive feat of scholarship, an original, syncretic reading of five poets loosely grouped under the "Black Mountain" heading..."
—College Literature
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