Rhetoric of the City: Robinson Jeffers and A. R. Ammons

There are many similarities in the development of urbanism and literature in the last two hundred years, resulting from a correspondence between modes of city-planning and modes of literary expression. The symbolic city, connected to the transcendental sphere of myth, evolved into the allegorical city that was transcendentally disconnected. In literature, initially there was no distinction between the symbol and allegory, but for nineteenth-century writers both were antithetical. Later, the symbol and allegory were merely ornaments, embodying a nostalgic drive for the unity of a subject and the products of its perception. Robinson Jeffers’s poetry, like the early twentieth-century city, relies on the symbol while A. R. Ammons’s poetry, like the late twentieth-century city, is allegorical in its essence. These similarities are not coincidental, but prove that the city and literature belong to the same socio-cultural sphere.

The Author: Paweł Marcinkiewicz received his Ph.D. from the University of Silesia in Katowice (Poland). He teaches at the University of Opole and the State Teacher Training College in Opole. His honors include the Polish Cultural Foundation Award and the Czesław Miłosz Award, sponsored by the Nobel Prize winner.