TY  - BOOK
AU  - Costello,Bonnie
TI  - The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others 
SN  - 9780691172811
AV  - PR6001.U4 
U1  - 821.914 23
PY  - 2017///]
CY  - Princeton, NJ : 
PB  - Princeton University Press, 
KW  - Poetry
KW  - Criticism and interpretation
KW  - LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry
KW  - bisacsh
KW  - Elizabeth Bishop
KW  - George Oppen
KW  - Law Like Love
KW  - Montaigne
KW  - Plato
KW  - T. S. Eliot
KW  - The Orators
KW  - W. H. Auden
KW  - Wallace Stevens
KW  - Walt Whitman
KW  - ambiguity
KW  - audience relationship
KW  - common
KW  - crowds
KW  - first-person plural
KW  - group identity
KW  - love poems
KW  - love poetry
KW  - performers
KW  - philosophy of language
KW  - plurality
KW  - poems
KW  - poet
KW  - poetic audience
KW  - poetry
KW  - poets
KW  - pronouns
KW  - self
KW  - social thought
KW  - togetherness
KW  - universals
KW  - we
N1  - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; 1. Speaking of Us --; 2. The Demagogue and the Sotto Voce --; 3. Song of My Selves --; 4. Private Stuff and Public Spirit --; 5. Tribes and Ambiguities --; 6. Poet and Audience --; 7. Crowds, Publics, Congregations --; 8. Invitations to the Common --; 9. The Future of Us --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index; restricted access
N2  - The Plural of Us is the first book to focus on the poet’s use of the first-person plural voice—poetry’s “we.” Closely exploring the work of W. H. Auden, Bonnie Costello uncovers the trove of thought and feeling carried in this small word. While lyric has long been associated with inwardness and a voice saying “I,” “we” has hardly been noticed, even though it has appeared throughout the history of poetry. Reading for this pronoun in its variety and ambiguity, Costello explores the communal function of poetry—the reasons, risks, and rewards of the first-person plural.Costello adopts a taxonomic approach to her subject, considering “we” from its most constricted to its fully unbounded forms. She also takes a historical perspective, following Auden’s interest in the full range of “the human pluralities” in a time of particular pressure for and against the collective. Costello offers new readings as she tracks his changing approach to voice in democracy. Examples from many other poets—including Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens—arise throughout the book, and the final chapter offers a consideration of how contemporary writers find form for what George Oppen called “the meaning of being numerous.”Connecting insights to philosophy of language and to recent work in concepts of community, The Plural of Us shows how poetry raises vital questions—literary and social—about how we speak of our togetherness
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400887873?locatt=mode:legacy
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781400887873
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781400887873/original
ER  -