Coherence and Poetic Truth: The American Example

FAIN: FA-53633-07

Angus Stewart Fletcher
CUNY Research Foundation, Graduate School and University Center (New York, NY 10016-4309)

I will write a book on American poems of the environment, showing how their symbolic translation of ecological depiction produces a parallel vision of the life of the mind. Longfellow and Whitman generate a tradition by which Americans adopt the philosophical method known as the Coherence Theory of Truth, which evades all slavish consistencies of mere argument. Starting with John Ashbery, the book will contextualize a wide range of other modern poets, who help us to perceive the ambiguous truth underlying rapid, ever changing conditions. Coherence is the ultimate aim in thus training the interpretor's mind.