One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America

by Dan Chiasson

One Kind of Everything elucidates the uses of autobiography and constructions of personhood in American poetry since World War II, with helpful reference to American literature in general since Emerson. Taking on one of the most crucial issues in American poetry of the last fifty years, celebrated poet Dan Chiasson explores what is lost or gained when real-life experiences are made part of the subject matter and source material for poetry. In five extended, scholarly essays—on Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank Bidart, Frank O’Hara, and Louise Glück—Chiasson looks specifically to bridge the chasm between formal and experimental poetry in the United States. Regardless of form, Chiasson argues that recent American poetry is most thoughtful when it engages most forcefully with autobiographical material, either in an effort to embrace it or denounce it.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

208 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2007

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

In sometimes-thorny prose, Chiasson analyzes how autobiography appears in/impacts the work of Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank Bidart, Frank O'Hara, Louise Gluck, and a few "language" poets. This book is Academic and takes itself very seriously--I wouldn't have expected less from Chiasson, with his Harvard Ph.D. and all. Reading this book made me feel like a student again (in both good and bad ways).

Chiasson's argument, though not always explicitly stated, is that autobiography is "inevitable as a poetic subject... in a very loose sense." Sometimes the concern with autobiography is explicit in the poems, as in some of Lowell's work, but Chiasson argues for "displacement of the personal onto sturdier, more objective sites" for most of the poets, with varying success.

As I read the first two sections, on Lowell and Bishop, I felt unsatisfied--the analysis was strong, but the lack of autobiographical framing made his arguments less compelling. However, later, Chiasson's reading of a section of "The Second Hour of the Night" by Bidart lit up my mind, and his discussion of Frank O'Hara was so interesting that it made me want to read more O'Hara than I have.

I'd be interested to read more reviews of the book--let me know if you've seen any.

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, I finally finished this. It's great--I learned so much. It's also dense in the way that all academic writing is dense, and though Chiasson is a good academic writer, I'll need to go back and re-read some to keep his points in mind/understand them better. I haven't got it all yet. Need to read a lot more Gluck and Lowell, although I'm pretty pleased with my status on the Bishop & O'Hara chapters. Bidart in the middle. Reading this made me wish I HAD gone and done a PhD and profoundly grateful that I could just savor it WITHOUT any of those critical pressures at the same time. I wish the chapter at the end on the Language poets and their changing relationship to person and autobiography had been longer. And that's quite a thing to say at the end of a dense critical book.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The chapters on Lowell and Bishop are particularly good; Chiasson's chapters on Bidart and Glück are not as well organized, and the poems he chooses as demonstrations of his points are not as apposite. Or rather they are ("Mock Orange" and "Ellen West" are as rich with meaning and challenge as anything else either wrote), but they seem to twist out of his control in a way that his glosses of Lowell's and Bishop's poems do not.