Carl Dennis: Generosity (January 2002)

What does it mean, Carl Dennis asks, for the speaker of a poem to be generous? And how might such generosity serve as an aesthetic as well as a moral virtue? Focusing on poems by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, but turning, too, to work by Robert Lowell and Amy Gerstler, Dennis considers how generosity manifests at the level of craft, exploring its relationship to other elements of a poem such as irony, empathy, and narrative distance.