{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.04132231404958678, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.824742268041237, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Naturalism in the American Theatre

art of literature is to adjust the language so that it embodies what it indicates. Ultimately, what makes Bedient's perspective inappropriate is not so much his formal biases as the root of many such biases his assumptions about the age in which we live. He writes that Kinsella's 'Nightwalker' is more modern than 'The Waste Land' because it is 'forty years more advanced in despair,' and that "For him (as for most modern artists) the centre of gravity has shifted downward into terror.' Forwhom, one may ask Eliot? Stevens? Auden? To describe our age, Bedient constantly turns to such words as 'terror,' 'maelstrom,' 'nullity,' 'void,' 'appalling.' Only a mind somewhat insensitive to the agonies of other ages could be so prone to exaggerate our own predicaments. Or our virtues, as when he writes of Stevie Smith: 'She was rather fierce about the truth a modern peculiarity.' As modern as Socrates. In the end, Bedient's considerable literary sophistication fails to arrive at a full, accurate view of contemporary British poetry because his view of contemporary culture conforms only too well to Spender's description of American Nowness: 'To be conscious only of the present (or of the past only in so far as it is useful to the present) is to have consciousness confined within the collective subjectivity of a particular generation which happens, by accident, to be alive at a particular time and place.' The time is that of Berryman and Lowell, Plath and Sexton, and the place is America. The book's dust jacket spells out the eight British poets' names in red, white, and blue colours 'more or less convertible,' in James's words. (JOHN REIBETANZ)