An African Elegy Criticism

This Study Guide consists of approximately 26 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of An African Elegy.

An African Elegy Criticism

This Study Guide consists of approximately 26 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of An African Elegy.
This section contains 261 words
(approx. 1 page at 400 words per page)
Buy the An African Elegy Study Guide

Although associated with the Projectivist school of Black Mountain poetry, Duncan is known as a romantic poet and a mystic whose verse often baffles readers. For example, John Crowe Ransom, after accepting "Sections Towards an African Elegy" (the original title of "An African Elegy") in 1943, returned it to Duncan the next year writing: "It seems to me to have obvious homosexual advertisement, and for that reason not to be eligible for publication." Ransom had re-read Duncan's poem after reading Duncan's essay "The Homosexual in Society" and saw things in it he hadn't before. "Is it not possible," he wrote Duncan, "that you have made the sexual inferences inescapable, and the poem unavailable?" Duncan biographer Ekbert Faas writes that even though Duncan acknowledged to Ransom that the sexual inferences in the poem were "inescapable," Faas himself does not find them as such. Faas sees Ransom's refusal to...

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This section contains 261 words
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Buy the An African Elegy Study Guide
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