Lovely, Flaring Destruction: J. H. Prynne, Charles Olson, Edward Dorn

Drawing on a line in a 1964 letter from J.H. Prynne to Charles Olson, this chapter works through the idea of an ‘emotional near-Marxism’ in Prynne’s The White Stones (1969) and related texts. The chapter reads Prynne’s correspondence with Olson as a negotiation of emergent U.S. imperialism and the decline of the British Empire. This is argued, in part, through a survey of the prevalence of Fulbright scholarships and university exchanges among Prynne’s contemporaries, suggesting poetry’s relationship to ‘soft power’. After arguing that Prynne’s geological metaphors are a species of ‘oceanic feeling’, the chapter turns to focus on his friendship with Edward Dorn. Through Dorn’s North Atlantic Turbine (1967) and Prynne’s involvement with the magazines The English Intelligencer (1966-68), the chapter suggests that Prynne moved unevenly towards a radical politics and a critique of imperialism.