Erotic Reckonings: Mastery and Apprenticeship in the Work of Poets and Lovers
Author:
Thomas Simmons
ISBN:
0252021207
Format:
Handover
Publish Date:
June, 2005
Book Review
Erotic Reckonings: Mastery and Apprenticeship in the Work of Poets and Lovers
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Erotic Reckonings explores the problem of tradition and authority in the lives and work of three pairs of twentieth-century American poets - Ezra Pound and H.D., Yvor Winters and Janet Lewis, and Louise Bogan and Theodore Roethke. Drawing on classical and feminist psychoanalytic theory, Thomas Simmons argues that mentor-apprentice relationships are inescapably erotic, though not necessarily sexual. Pound and Winters manifest profound conflicts between allegiance to a tradition of knowledge and allegiance to apprentices; both tend to master the apprentice, to bind her to a body of knowledge. In contrast, Bogan and Roethke display a different approach: wary of the value of a tradition of knowledge, Bogan insists that Roethke represent himself as a person of authority. She plays for him a role of sustained reciprocity, rather than of domination.