From Francis Bacon to Zadie Smith, British essayists have played a crucial role in defining and interrogating the idea of transatlantic essayism. Not to be confused with its American form, which has been central to the promotion of exceptionalist cultural ideology in the United States from the Puritans to the present, British transatlantic essayism came into its own in the early twentieth century. Beginning with an account of D.H. Lawrence’s essays and their critical engagement with Americanness, this chapter explores the development of transatlantic essayism in the work of key essayists for whom the Anglo-American context has been of central importance, including W.H. Auden, Christopher Hitchens, Pico Iyer, Martin Amis, and Zadie Smith. What emerges is both a history of British transatlantic essayism and an account of the ways in which it continues to complicate our sense of the modern essay’s development on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.

Robert Lowell’s sense of connection with John Berryman was deep, so much so that one critic has suggested that “[a]lthough they never collaborated, their achievement was, in many respects, a joint one.” In his poem “For John Berryman,” Lowell references several points of contact between the two poets, from their “last years” back to their earlier “good days,” but Lowell’s sense of Berryman is still hard to pin down. This is partly a question of context – how the Lowell–Berryman relationship has been positioned in relation to various cultural and critical trajectories of twentieth-century American poetry – but it can also be explained in terms of the ways that Lowell’s poems record the poet’s shifting sense of his contemporary’s profile and achievement. Paying close attention to Lowell’s poetic engagement with Berryman, this chapter expands our sense of the relationship between two of the most important poets of the so-called Middle Generation.

The complicated relationship between American and European cultural production, particularly in the nineteenth century, is the subject of this chapter. American essayists of this period were, on the one hand, greatly influenced by the literature and culture of Europe and sought to absorb its lessons into their own writing. On the other, these same essayists pushed back against the idea that European writing should be their primary influence. Instead, they frequently critiqued Europe from afar and sought to develop a new idiom and fresh form of expression unique to the United States. Writers like Washington Irving, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Henry James, and Henry David Thoreau explored the many tensions between the United States and Europe in their essays and used them to debate the extent to which America should remain in Europe’s cultural shadow.

This chapter examines a lesser-studied element of Wallace’s intertextual engagement: his engagements with poets, poetry and poetics. Although he once claimed that he was “not talented enough” to be a poet, Wallace’s writing was deeply immersed in and often concerned with questions to do with the nature of poetry and the figure of the poet. Some of his titles refer or allude to specific poems – from “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (George Berkeley) to The Pale King (John Keats) – while other texts, such as the short story “Here and There,” use the idea of poetry to explore the relationship between language and experience, expression and form. In his longer works, too, Wallace uses particular poets in interesting (often entertaining) ways – W. H. Auden in The Broom of the System, for example, and Emily Dickinson in Infinite Jest. In interviews and essays, Wallace declared an interest in a wide range of poets, from W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore and Philip Larkin to Bill Knott and Stephen Dobyn. Taken together, these and further examples suggest that a more detailed account of Wallace’s writing on and about poetry will fill a particular gap in the understandings of his work.

Revisiting the Marriage Question

WHAT DO WE THINK ABOUT when we think about Robert Lowell and marriage? A little over a decade ago, Grzegorz Kosc provided an important reading of the topic with regard to what he called the “counseling” influence of William Carlos Williams on Lowell's work. In the wake of Jeffrey Meyers's publication of Robert Lowell in Love (2015), however, in which the poet's marriages and other romantic/sexual relationships are presented as the key to understanding the poet's art, the question demands fresh consideration. The question is also important because Lowell explores the topic of marriage in several poems—so much so that it is explicitly flagged in several of his poems’ titles, from “‘To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage’” in Life Studies (1959) to “Marriage,” which is partly based on Jan Van Eyck's painting The Arnolfini Portrait (1434), in Day by Day (1977). The list of such poems also includes “Marriage” in History (1973) and “Marriage?,” the fourth sonnet in a group of five entitled “Caroline” in The Dolphin (1976). The Dolphin also includes a sixteen-sonnet sequence entitled “Marriage.” These poems and groups of poems in themselves signal Lowell's recurring concern with the question of marriage, and his sense of its complexity. This is to be expected, perhaps, of a poet who was himself married three times. When considering the issue of Lowell and marriage, indeed, our first impulse might be to refer to the poet's actual marriages to Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Caroline Blackwood. It is undoubtedly useful to know that Lowell was married to Stafford in the 1940s, and the story of his marriage to Hardwick, from 1949 until their divorce in 1972, when he married Blackwood, is also a central part of the narrative of his artistic and cultural emergence.

The poet clearly used his experience of marriage to these three women as material for his work, but readers of Lowell—or any poet, for that matter—should also know that the relationship between life and art is never straightforward. The problem with Meyers's reading of Lowell is that he does not explore the complexity of this issue but, rather, sees the poems as providing what he calls an “autobiographical bounty” for the researcher.

‘English disputes’ and American readings

‘Nothing could be more wrongheaded than the English disputes about Dylan Thomas's greatness,’ Robert Lowell wrote in 1947, before going on to dismiss the ‘inarticulate extravagance of Edith Sitwell and Herbert Read’ and the ‘methodical, controversial blindness of [Arthur] Symons, [Geoffrey] Grigson’ and others. In the decades since Thomas's death, however, the critical response to Thomas's work in the United States has been no less puzzling. Critics and literary historians tend to underestimate Thomas's influence, and his importance to many American poets, despite the fact that several major figures – including John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery – have expressed a sense of affinity with Thomas's work. John Goodby's view that ‘[t]he scope of Thomas's impact on US poetry is remarkable’ is not shared by many US American poetry scholars and commentators. Nick Halpern briefly acknowledges the influence of Thomas and ‘the New Romantics’ on Denise Levertov's early poetry in his essay in The Cambridge History of American Poetry (2015), but Edward Brunner, writing in the same volume, is quick to group Thomas among the ‘“Bohemian” poets of rhetorical excess’, whose example was rejected by American poets who started to gain prominence in the 1970s, including Robert Pinsky and Mark Strand. Apart from these brief references, Thomas is not mentioned in Bendixen and Burt's history – not even in discussions of those poets for whom he has been generally acknowledged as a hugely important figure, such as Berryman and others of the so-called Middle Generation.

A similar tendency to undervalue Thomas's importance in US American poetic culture is expressed by Robert von Hallberg in his essay on American poetry between 1945 and 1950 in the eighth volume of Sacvan Bercovitch's Cambridge History of American Literature (1996). Von Hallberg suggests, on the one hand, that ‘Thomas's career was a stunning spectacle of a poet who openly refused to be minor’: for ‘the generation of Lowell, Berryman, and [Randall] Jarrell […] [h]e was spoken of as another Shakespeare, or as a fake, but not as a minor or academic poet.’ Von Hallberg presents Thomas's public persona as something poets such as Lowell and Berryman sought to imitate, quite apart from any engagement with his approach to language or form.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF URBAN space from what Friedrich Engels termed ‘the great towns’ in the middle decades of the nineteenth century to the ‘metropolis’ of the twentieth century coincides with an elevation in the short story's status as a literary genre. This is not, perhaps, an obvious connection: why would a writer choose to address the city – evoking as it does ideas of architectural and spatial largeness, sociocultural diversity and openness – in a form that is commonly associated with aesthetic principles of brevity and strict economies of scale? The history of modern literature is full of examples of novels that seek to represent the vastness of cities, from Honoré de Balzac's Ferragus: Chief of the Devorants (1833) – which captures what Italo Calvino called ‘the monster that is Paris’ – to the ‘Hibernian Metropolis’ of Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). It is not difficult to appreciate why Balzac, Joyce and others felt that the novel was an appropriate form to contend with the magnitude and multifariousness of the metropolis; as we will see, however, the short story has had its own distinctive relationship to the city, and has made a contribution, quite different from the novel's, to the literature of urban modernity.

In The Painter of Modern Life (1863), Charles Baudelaire offered the following analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's ‘The Man of the Crowd’, a story which for the French author captured the quality of ‘life in the capital cities’: