Notes and Comments

Paul Metcalf was a unique force in twentieth-century American literature, an eccentric in the best sense of the word. A great-grandson of Herman Melville, he was one of a handful of writers to have reconciled nineteenthcentury American prose traditions with disjunctive practices of early twentieth-century American poetry. In literary geneologies, Metcalf is linked not only with Melville, but with the Black Mountain poet Charles Olson. In many ways, however, Metcalf's own documentary collage style owed more to Olson's immediate poetic predecessors than to the self-styled "post-modern" author of The Maximus Poems. When asked about his own idiosyncratic writing style, Metcalf described it as …

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Publication information: Article title: Notes and Comments. Contributors: Not available. Journal title: Chicago Review. Volume: 45. Issue: 1 Publication date: January 1, 1999. Page number: 119+. © 1999 University of Chicago. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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