Elliptical poetry

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Elliptical poetry, or ellipticism, is a term in literary criticism that was first used by Frederick Pottle in The Idiom of Poetry. Robert Penn Warren further explained the idea in his essay Pure and Impure Poetry. Stephanie Burt revived and expanded the term in a 1998 Boston Review essay about Susan Wheeler, and then in an essay of the same name in American Letters & Commentary. Since then, elliptical poetry and the poets associated with it have become an important reference point in discussions of contemporary American poetry. Wheeler notes in an introduction to Burt that, in conversations with graduate students, she has heard people express a desire to be an elliptical poet.

In Warren’s discussion, the elliptical approach is a kind of pure poetry that pushes the private experiences or ideas beyond what earlier poets would have considered acceptable. For readers, the key feature is not the imagery itself but the poetry’s obscurity—the sense that you must supply something to the poem without being told what it is.

Burt’s Boston Review piece describes elliptical poets as aiming to show a speaking voice that reflects the poet, while also using recent verbal techniques that undermine clear coherence. They are post-avant-garde or post-postmodern, often drawing on Stein’s heirs and the language-writers, but choosing a different path. Elliptical poems frequently jump between slangy and high, “poetic” diction, and some use lists like “I am an X, I am a Y.” The poets often favor established influences like Dickinson, Berryman, Ashbery, and Auden. They tell stories that are almost there or almost obscure, and they can be sardonic, angry, difficult, or entertaining—without trying to imitate television.

Tony Hoagland, writing in Poetry Magazine, noted that Burt’s definition is broad enough to cover the diverse poetry she champions and that she correctly captures its energy and its resistance to expectation.

C. D. Wright, a poet Burt labels elliptical, expressed some reluctance about the label in an interview, saying it’s a way to recognize poets who don’t fit neatly into a team and whose work shares some but not all concerns with others.

In a 2009 Boston Review essay, Burt argued that a new movement she called “The New Thing” has followed Ellipticism.