Robert Lowell, Life Studies, and the Father Poetry of Michael Hofmann Symbiosis 5.2 173-89

Essay Excerpt

"Perhaps coincidentally, Stanley Kunitz, also in 1987, pre-empted Morrison when he noted the development of ‘the father-and-son poem, as written from the perspective of the son’. Although concentrating exclusively on American poetry, Kunitz accords with Morrison about the unprecedented rise in the genre from the mid-century but, despite writing after the publication of major British father poem sequences from Tony Harrison, Hugo Williams and Michael Hofmann, claims the genre for America: Isolated examples may be found elsewhere in contemporary literature (witness Dylan Thomas’s eloquent villanelle), but the unique proliferation of the theme in our own country suggests that it is an authentic cultural manifestation"​​.