The Rhapsodic Fallacy (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. 'The Rhapsodic Fallacy' is an essay by United States poet Mary Kinzie in which she defines and attacks a "rhapsodic" conception of poetry. It was first published in Salmagundi 65 of Fall 1984 and was collected in The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet's Calling, and a somewhat shorter version of the essay was later anthologized in Twentieth-Century American Poetics The essay was one of several of the mid 1980s that sparked a heated discussion over the role of form in American poetry, and was thus implicated in the formation of the New Formalism movement. Kinzie describes the Objective Style as gaining its effects from "the cumulative effect of a string of brief, bland declarative sentences." She lists the tools of the style as being: juxtaposition, portent, non sequitur, and passivity. The last of these, she notes, claims "a kind of reportorial honesty" for the poem.