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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
Alan Golding, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. xvii + 243 pp. $52.00; $19.95 paper.
Alan Golding's From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry is indeed, as its introduction claims, one of the few books currently available that takes on the issue of canon formation in the field of American poetry. Why there should be such a study is implicit, but never made explicit, in the book. Canonicity, as Robert von Hallberg has pointed out (with respect to, specifically, American poetry, in his American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980), and print culture in general (as Benedict Anderson has brought to our attention) are intimately tied up with the formation of a national(ist) identity. Poetry, as any quick survey of literary nationalism will reveal, is far more easily pressed into the service of national identity formation than other forms of writing and seems to carry a symbolic weight in the national Imaginary that makes such civic service important. Almost every era and nation has a national poet, a representative poet, a poet laureate, et cetera, whether by popular acclaim, self-appointment, or official decree; no such office, formal or informal, exists for more narrative forms of imaginative writing, though the latter is far more often studied in such contexts. Why conventional narrative genres are so much dearer to the hearts of materialist critics than more "writerly" texts is a good question (not the primary one in Golding's study, but one close to the surface, and one that should at some point be attended to as well as attended from); I suspect the answer resonates with an observation recently made by Ron Silliman, that the inability to read poetry seems to increase as folks engage higher levels of professionalism in academic literary studies. This observation speaks directly to one of Golding's underlying concerns, that of the intellectually straitjacketing effects of disciplinary formation, especially as it pertains to poetry and the professionalization of "English" in the American academy.
From Outlaw to Classic approaches this issue of canonicity and national identity explicitly only in the first chapter, which is to my mind the most historically ambitious and...
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