{"title":"Thomas Travisano","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"words-in-air-book-thomas-travisano-9780571243082","title":"Words in Air","description":"When first introduced to Robert Lowell in 1947, Elizabeth Bishop wrote that 'he was living in a basement room on Third Avenue . . . and was rather untidy. He was wearing a rumpled dark blue suit . . . I took to him at once.' Lowell was equally taken by Bishop, and thought she had 'more to offer, I think, than anyone writing poems in English'. The candid, affectionate, constrained and loving friendship of the two American poets is recorded in letters written over three decades. It begins after the publication of their first books, when they were 'as mischievous as children about the figures they held most in awe' (David Kalstone), and ends only with Lowell's death. The letters also record the complications of each other's lives - Lowell's mental illness, Bishop's struggles with alcohol, their mutually crossed love affairs. In their now celebrated correspondences, they performed best for one another, as the drama of their public and private lives unfolded.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49549029507345,"sku":"GOR005807739","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52785561207057,"sku":"GOR009401381","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53242875642129,"sku":"GOR014826428","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0571243088.jpg?v=1758968598"},{"product_id":"love-unknown-book-thomas-travisano-9780143111283","title":"Love Unknown","description":"Elizabeth Bishop's friend James Merrill once observed that 'Elizabeth had more talent for life - and for poetry - than anyone else I've known.' This new biography reveals just how she learned to marry her talent for life with her talent for writing in order to create a brilliant array of poems, prose, and letters - a remarkable body of work that would make her one of America's most beloved and celebrated poets.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50131425231121,"sku":"CIN0143111280VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":50999445651729,"sku":"NIN9780143111283","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52489246146833,"sku":"NLS9780143111283","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0143111280.jpg?v=1751290470"},{"product_id":"love-unknown-book-thomas-travisano-9780525428817","title":"Love Unknown","description":"Elizabeth Bishop's friend James Merrill once observed that 'Elizabeth had more talent for life - and for poetry - than anyone else I've known.' This new biography reveals just how she learned to marry her talent for life with her talent for writing in order to create a brilliant array of poems, prose, and letters - a remarkable body of work that would make her one of America's most beloved and celebrated poets.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50356094173457,"sku":"CIN052542881XA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51695800680721,"sku":"CIN052542881XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51741034873105,"sku":"GOR012731787","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51856604397841,"sku":"GOR010840570","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53096463696145,"sku":"CIN052542881XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/052542881X.jpg?v=1751292979"},{"product_id":"midcentury-quartet-book-thomas-travisano-9780813928340","title":"Midcentury Quartet","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn a February 1966 letter to her artistic confidant, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop tellingly grouped four midcentury poets: Lowell, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and herself. For Bishop--always wary of being pigeonholed and therefore reticent about naming her favorite contemporaries--it was a rare explicit acknowledgment of an informal but enduring artistic circle that has evaded the notice of literary journalists for more than forty years. Despite the private nature of their dialogue, the group's members--Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, and Berryman--left a compelling record of their mutual interchange and influence. Drawing on an extensive range of published and archival sources, Thomas Travisano traces these poets' creation of a surprisingly coherent postmodern aesthetic and defines its continuing influence on American poetry.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe refusal of this midcentury quartet, as Travisano calls them, to voice a formalized doctrine, coupled with their intuitive way of working, has caused critics to miss the coherence of their project. Travisano argues that these poets are not only successors to Pound, Auden, Stevens, and Eliot but postmodern explorers in their own right. In forging their own aesthetic, characterized here as a postmodern mode of elegy, they encountered significant resistance from their immediate modernist mentors Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Marianne Moore.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJarrell, whom others of the group regarded as a critic of particular genius, was first described as a post-modernist in a 1941 review by Ransom that Travisano cites as the earliest known use of the term. In Jarrell's review of Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle six years later, he named Lowell a postmodernist and identified traits, among them the use of pastiche, that are now considered by theorists such as Fredric Jameson as specifically postmodern. And Bishop's inventiveness allowed her to adapt a self-exploratory mode often, but imprecisely, termed confessional to challenging forms such as the double sonnet, villanelle, and sestina.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEach of these poets suffered a devastating loss during childhood and lived through the twentieth-century disasters of the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust, and the cold war. The continual tension in their poetry between subjectivity and form, claims Travisano, reflects the plight of the fractured individual in a postmodern world. By arguing so sharply for the importance of this circle, Midcentury Quartet is certain to redraw the map of postwar American poetry.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52144770547985,"sku":"NLS9780813928340","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780813928340.jpg?v=1757590479"},{"product_id":"elizabeth-bishop-phenomenon-book-thomas-travisano-9780807187104","title":"The Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon\u003c\/i\u003e collects Thomas Travisano's enlightening essays about the poet and her work, written over the course of thirty-plus years. Beginning with the founding of the Elizabeth Bishop Society and moving through work on the editing of her letters and the writing of her biography, Travisano charts the steps by which Bishop ascended from a \"good minor poet\" to being recognized as a major voice in American literature. This career-spanning volume offers a unique window into literary and cultural history and the processes by which entry into the literary canon may be achieved. Travisano's approachable, rigorously researched essays also illustrate the extraordinary range of perspectives from which a great author like Bishop can be read, with pieces concerning issues such as gender, nationality, influence, genre, and the potential for biographical investigation.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e By offering a vivid narrative of research on a major twentieth-century American writer, \u003ci\u003eThe Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon\u003c\/i\u003e provides a close-up view of how a subject grows in stature across many decades of writing and public advocacy.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":53390807367953,"sku":"NGR9780807187104","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780807187104.jpg?v=1775675518"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-thomas-travisano.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}