The specificity of Philip Whalen’s poetic speech

The article is devoted to the analysis of the poetic speech of the Beat poet Philip Whalen (1923–2002), whose work goes beyond the classical aesthetics and poetics of the Beats. The purpose of the work is to identify the unique features of his poetic tradition, which were formed at the intersection of American modernism and Buddhist philosophical thought. The main focus was on describing the facts that made Whalen’s work unique, reviewing how the concept of “poetic speech” evolved in the twentieth century, and how it relates to Whalen’s texts. Further, the analysis of specific texts identified the key factors of his poetics, namely, meditative nature, the reduction of the lyrical self, and the embodiment of the Buddhist principle of “Emptiness”. At the end of the article, a parallel is drawn with the language poets of the 1970s, and the prospects for future research on this author are outlined.

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