Stephanie Burt

Stephanie Burt (formerly published as Stephen Burt) is an American literary critic and poet who is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. The New York Times has called her "one of the most influential poetry critics of [her] generation." Burt grew up around Washington, D.C. She has published various collections of poetry and a large amount of literary criticism and research. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, and other publications.

Literary criticism

Elliptical poetry

Burt received significant attention for coining the term "Elliptical poetry" in a 1998 book review of Susan Wheeler's book Smokes in Boston Review magazine: Elliptical poets try to manifest a person—who speaks the poem and reflects the poet—while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves. They are post-avant-gardist, or post-"postmodern": they have read (most of them) Stein's heirs, and the "language writers," and have chosen to do otherwise. Elliptical poems shift drastically between low (or slangy) and high (or naively "poetic") diction. Some are lists of phrases beginning "I am an X, I am a Y." Ellipticism's favorite established poets are Dickinson, Berryman, Ashbery, and/or Auden [...] The poets tell almost-stories, or almost-obscured ones. They are sardonic, angered, defensively difficult, or desperate; they want to entertain as thoroughly as, but not to resemble, television.

Burt also adds that Elliptical poets are "good at describing information overload." In addition to calling Wheeler an important Elliptical poet, she also lists Liam Rector's The Sorrow of Architecture (1984), Lucie Brock-Broido's The Master Letters (1995), Mark Ford's Landlocked (1992), and Mark Levine's Debt (1993) as "some groundbreaking and definitively Elliptical books."

The New Thing

In 2009, she wrote "The New Things", an essay in which she posits a new category of American contemporary poets which she calls "The New Thing". These poets derive their style from writers like William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Gertrude Stein, and George Oppen: The poets of the New Thing observe scenes and people (not only, but also, themselves) with a self-subordinating concision, so much so that the term "minimalism" comes up in discussions of their work [...] The poets of the New Thing eschew sarcasm and tread lightly with ironies, and when they seem hard to pin down, it is because they leave space for interpretations to fit [...] The new poetry, the new thing, seeks, as Williams did, well-made, attentive, unornamented things.