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Chapter 13 - Inebriation

The Poetics of Drink

from Part III - Applications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2018

Gitanjali G. Shahani
Affiliation:
San Francisco State University
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Summary

The poetics of drink is a poetics of conflict. On the one hand, there are the bull-roarers of Bacchus, the orgiastic Maenads, the mystical priests of the vine, the poets and prophets whose drinking songs or sacraments celebrate the inspiring and perhaps entheogenic virtues of consciousness-transforming intoxication. On the other hand, there are the Malvolios, the hatchet-wielding Carrie Nations, the temperance workers, and–most telling of all–the recovering alcoholics, who testify to the disease and dis-ease of drunkenness. This essay offers an exploration of poetic inspiration and intoxication. The confusion of spirit as alcohol with spirit as soul or breath helps explain why a poetics of drink seems to have shaped or shadowed the poetry–and fiction–of so many writers. Her analysis includes “alcoholic writers” from a long list of Nobel prize winners (Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner) and beyond the Nobel winners, Hart Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Louise Bogan, Dylan Thomas, Delmore Schwartz, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Bishop, John Cheever, Dorothy Parker, among others.
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Food and Literature , pp. 253 - 269
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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