Discovery and Reminiscence: Essays on the Poetry of Mona Van Duyn Book

Emancipating Pragmatism uncovers the hidden root structure that connects Ralph Waldo Emerson to Harryette Mullen via figures as dazzlingly diverse as John Dewey, Amiri Baraka, Kenneth Burke, Ornette Coleman, William Carlos Williams, Paul Goodman, Frank O'Hara, William James, Susan Howe, and Ralph W. Ellison. What Magee sees as the link between them is a practice he calls "democratic symbolic action": an insistence that the meaning of democracy--its yen for heterogeneity, improvisation, and collaborative experiment--be enacted at the level of the sentence. Through a lucid riff on the pragmatist tradition, he reminds us that the search for a relationship between aesthetic practice and political action so central to contemporary poetics has been an ongoing obsession in American letters since at least the 1850s.