| Abstrakt: |
In this article, the author discusses on ekphrasis as postmodern witness in Denise Levertov's late poetry. Levertov's poems about works of art occur also in the context of her ongoing concern about how political resistance is to be expressed in lyric poetry. As Alicia Ostriker has written, distinguishing "the poetics of postmodern witness" from confessional poetry, some poets after World War II have reacted to Theodore Adorno's famous declaration that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz with renewed determination to continue the struggle with the self that is also the struggle with what Auschwitz stands for-"not only the Holocaust but also the ongoing concatenation of horrors scarring twentieth-century history." They have done so, as Ostriker puts it, "by avoiding a poetics purely of the self," on one hand, and by refusing to abandon the lyric "I," on the other, lest they deny a consciousness "that desires, suffers and chooses," and thus prosides an ethical and political model for the reader. |
