Individuality and the Communal Experience in Ralph Gustafson's Selected Poetry

Abstract

A new mode of writing and a very dominant one in postmodern poetry is the existence of number of tensions and contradictions. It might come from the increasing issues resulted from the problematic aesthetics of sincerity. In his poetry, Gustafson tries to deal with issues like the contrast between the practical experience and as well as the transcendent desire, the contrast of poetical issues like the sincere of and the rhetoric, the real and the artifice. He was also after figuring out what these tensions bring out. It seems that much of Gustafson’s poetry of the late 1930s as well as the 1940s deals with these issues of problems related to self-presentation, he faced trying to fill the gap between himself and his community. Through expression he tries to reflect the needs of what is personal and what is communal that lodged him.