Word Sightings: Poetry and Visual Media in Stevens, Bishop, and O'Hara

This book examines the response of twentieth-century American poetry to the proliferation of technical and visual media. It treats the modern poet's problem of how to accommodate a cultural focus on photo-realism and technologically enhanced vision in a verbal aesthetic medium that itself generates no actual images. Relying on references to material media in the poets' correspondence and biographies, as well as on tropes and visual semiotics in the poems, the project explores the paradoxical sensation of reality effects in language.