Authors

Erik Muller

Document Type

Book

Publication Date

2005

Abstract

“You could say I saw California grow up. Right along with me!” So Josephine Miles linked her life and region (Childress 40). The link between her poetry and California has not always been declared by the poet or detected by her readers. Miles mused upon the problem: “Sometimes there’s a certain kind of critic that says I’m a California poet [. . .] he says I have a lot of loose lines and a lot of locale. But then another critic will say, ‘She’s not to be identified as anything but English because her poetry is rather neat and universal’” (Marie 37). While Denis Donoghue cannot find “a California element in her sensibility” (443), Donald Davie detects in Miles “that California aspiration” to place poetry back into “the humdrum of daily life” (85).

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