The Male Image: Representations of Masculinity in Postwar Poetry [Paperback]

This book discusses how masculinity is represented by women poets and gay poets - but, most of all, how it is represented by straight male poets. It shows how Robert Lowell and John Berryman both identify a gender malaise in themselves which they struggle with throughout their careers, and how Derek Walcott displays a profound gender insecurity in relation to the colonial experience. It discusses the impact on Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney of their belief in a transcendent feminine principle, and how C.K. Williams and Paul Muldoon display the impact of feminism on male poets who are young enough to have encountered it at a formative period.Acknowledgements Introduction Men and Mermaids: Robert Lowell's Martial Masculinity and Beyond Berryman and Buried Women Ted Hughes and the Goddess of Complete Being Able Seaman and the Penile Canon: Derek Walcott's Adamic Utterance Sons of Mother Ireland: Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon 'Insofar As They Are Embodiments of the Patriarchal Idea': Women Representing Men The Politics of Camp: Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery Creeps and Bastards: C.K. Williams as VoyeurIAN GREGSON was born in Manchester and educated at Oxford and Hull and since 1997 has been Lecturer in English, University of Wales, Bangor. He is an award-winning poet and has published poems and reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Poetry Review, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. His Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism: Dialogue and Estrangement was published by Macmillan in 1996.