UNDERSTANDING THE POST IN POST-MODERN AMERICAN POETRY

Authors: Njume Emmanuel Ekindesone PhD & Acho Lesley Lem PhD

ABSTRACT  

The question about the meaning of the postmodern text has become quite a complex and often controversial one in contemporary literary circles. What was accepted as poetics as prescribed by Aristotle, Alexander Pope and the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, emphasizing tranquility, requiring rhyme schemes, decorum and diction, leading to meaning; has given way to a type of art which celebrates chaos, upholds experimentation transcends genres and traverses borders of meaning. Literary discourse even in Neo-Classical times emphasized the iambic pentameter and the rhyme royal used by many of its advocates. However, post WWII, poets, as well as post-industrializations’ poets have assumed a rather controversial position by engaging in pastiche to the detriment of the meaning of the poem. The paper hypothesizes that the meaning of the postmodern poem, cannot be appreciated without referring to inter-textual and other trans-meta-con-textual interpretations which continually nuance the meaning of texts.

Keywords: Postmodern, Postmodernism, Poetics, Poetry, Meta-Texts

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