Creating Another Self makes two significant literary assertions. First, that all first-person voice poetry necessarily involves a 'masking' of some kind; and second, that all personal poetry falls into one of three masking modes: the confessional, the persona, and the self-effacing. Samuel Maio supports these claims with an in-depth analysis of the work of representative poets, three for each mode: Robert Lowell, James Wright, and Anne Sexton (confessional); John Berryman, Weldon Kees, and Galway Kinnell (persona); and Mark Strand, Charles Simic, and David Ignatow (self-effacing). Further, the book draws on the work of several newer poets such as Garrett Hongo and Jim Barnes to suggest that personal poetry has had a far reaching influence on 20th century poetry. A work of theoretical criticism, and not a survey of personal poets, Creating Another Self suggests that contemporary personal poetry is a distinctive phase begun in the 1950s and coming to a close in the 1990s. The book is an important work for scholars of American literature and for creative writers.

Author Biography

Samuel Maio is Associate Professor of English at San Jose State University, where he serves as the Director of Creative Writing. His articles and poetry have appeared in Antioch, Bloomsbury, Chariton, and Northwest reviews, New York Quarterly, The Southern California Anthology, and numerous other journals. He is the recipient of a Phi Kappa Phi award for his scholarly writing.