Ian D. Copestake – Författare

The poet as an inheritor of an Emersonian tradition, and Paterson as an ethical autobiography in progress.William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) is the most influential figure in the development of American poetry in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. His simple language and focus on the familiar objects and voices of everyday life pulled poetry out of the past and restored its ability to express contemporary experience. Williams believed passionately in poetry's usefulness, abhorring its perception as an esoteric pursuit and insisting on the impact it could have on the life of a reader if only made relevant to his or her experience. Examining the sources of this belief, Ian Copestake breaks new ground by tracing the enduring impact of Williams's youthful experience of Unitarianism on his poetry and arguing that Williams is a poet in an Emersonian tradition.Two chapters focus on Williams's long poem Paterson, arguing that its long gestation -- from 1927 to 1951 -- reflects its role asan ethical autobiography in progress. Copestake investigates sources that point to the ethical heart of Williams's poetry and to his lifelong belief that "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there."Ian D. Copestake is a Lecturer at the University of Bamberg, Germany and editor of the William Carlos Williams Review.

This book traces the origins of using sea journeys to treat mental illness, a practice recommended within the medical community through the nineteenth century. It also explores the profound consequences of such experiences on the health of writers who sought such cures as exemplified in their subsequent works. The use of sea voyages derived from the reception of Hippocratic medical treatises in the early Renaissance period that argued for the benefits of exposure to sea air and salt water for sufferers of depression and nervous disorders. Copestake traces how Western perceptions of the ocean, historically dominated by fear, were impacted by the works of writers, artists, and philosophers who took sea journeys to improve their mental health. Focusing on the Hippocratic medical discourse behind these journeys and the need for the ocean instilled by the mental health concerns of William Cowper, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, William James, Elizabeth Bishop, and Virgina Woolf in particular, he illustrates how the work that resulted from their respective associations of health with the ocean and bodies of water saw them each introduce individual modes of "oceanic thinking." The author also explores how these portrayals have positively impacted Western perceptions of the sea and our understanding of mental health up to the present day.