Collected Poems

by Paul Goodman, Taylor Stoehr (Editor)

Collecting all the poems from the poet's earlier volumes and many previously unpublished.

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Paul Goodman was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decentralization, democracy, education, media, politics, psychology, technology, urban planning, and war. As a humanist and self-styled man of letters, his works often addressed a common theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, and the responsibility to exercise autonomy, act creatively, and realize one's own human nature.
Born to a Jewish family in New York City, Goodman was raised by his aunts and sister and attended City College of New York. As an aspiring writer, he wrote and published poems and fiction before receiving his doctorate from the University of Chicago. He returned to writing in New York City and took sporadic magazine writing and teaching jobs, several of which he lost for his overt bisexuality and World War II draft resistance. Goodman discovered anarchism and wrote for libertarian journals. His radicalism was rooted in psychological theory. He co-wrote the theory behind Gestalt therapy based on Wilhelm Reich's radical Freudianism and held psychoanalytic sessions through the 1950s while continuing to write prolifically.
His 1960 book of social criticism, Growing Up Absurd, established his importance as a mainstream, antiestablishment cultural theorist. Goodman became known as "the philosopher of the New Left" and his anarchistic disposition was influential in 1960s counterculture and the free school movement. Despite being the foremost American intellectual of non-Marxist radicalism in his time, his celebrity did not endure far beyond his life. Goodman is remembered for his utopian proposals and principled belief in human potential.

Reviews

[Adrian]

This was my first experience with a collection of poems in a while. I had the occasional Shel Silverstein book or a brush with "Out of The Dust" in last elementary, but nothing serious until now. This collection of poems are the scraps, the one-offs, and the experiments that led Paul Goodman to his later mastery (I think. Admittedly, I haven't read any other Goodman than this.) A lot of it fell flat on me. It was a pretty long book, there wasn't so much a story as there was a few themes that kept popping up. I read a bit about the author's life before and after and it doesn't really match up with what was going on in the text. He was well known for being an educator, specifically he found a home being quoted by college aged leftists in the 1960's. But he wrote about less broad topics than politics here, mostly focusing on himself. His best poems, to me, were the ones where he dropped the formal act. He spoke about his sexuality, the death of his son, and other incredibly personal topics. I think that was his power. It was interesting to see how his writing styles developed. This was a style of text I have very limited experience with, so I hope this lays a good foundation for more to come. This felt to me as though I wasn't studying Van Gogh's Starry Night, rather, I was studying one of his sketchbooks. Incredibly important but not the final drafts. I give this a 4/5

[Brent · Rating 3 out of 5]

The reason I love Collected works so much is that you get the greatest parts of a poet's work in context, reading every unsuccessful poem it took to get to the ones that really work. I hadn't been very familiar with his work but I enjoyed the introduction. Some of it, particularly the more formal, fell completely flat for me, but then there would be a moment when he would really find what he was trying to say. Like most, he had some preoccupations (his sexuality, society, creator, his son's death) that took him over and seeing them attempted and attempted again later is an interesting experience.I came away with an appreciation for him, more for the story the poems add up to than the poems themselves, although some of them are great. I don't know that I'd recommend the single volumes, but there is quite a bit to like in the poems if you want to sift through.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is hard to believe that this man, Paul Goodman, was an admired man among education circles, even making a career out of speaking on the subject. I usually like the guy for two reasons: one, his ideas about education showed that his aim was for living education vs dead knowledge, and two, he had balls. He wrote openly about his sexuality and his longings. I haven't noticed many educators these days doing that! In this day and age one of his poems found on a teacher's myspace page could lead to dismissal!