On Being Serious
On Being Serious
This chapter analyzes the meaning of the phrase ‘new seriousness’ which has been used to characterize The New Poetry. Although the phrase may sound urgent and understandable at first reading, it is situated within a complex web of debts and implications. In the 1960s, the increased emphasis on one sort of seriousness, that of personal sincerity, became important at a time when seriousness as sanctioned by custom, tradition, social norm, oath and obligation became less binding. Marriage, for instance, may have been an exemplary form of an old seriousness, but it was being newly questioned in the lives of the poets. A. Alvarez defines seriousness as ‘the poet's ability and willingness to face the full range of his experience with his full intelligence; not to take the easy exits of either conventional response or choking incoherence’.
Keywords: poems, poetry, new seriousness, A. Alvarez, poets, marriage
Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
