Although Winfield Townley Scott belongs to that generation of American poets who were the first to inherit the Modernist legacies of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams—a generation which included John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Muriel Rukeyser, and Delmore Schwartz—he ultimately allied himself with the pre-moderns; Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson. Like them, he excelled at dramatic monologue and literary portraiture. What Scott shared with the Moderns, primarily William Carlos Williams, was an ear tuned to the music of American speech.
Like his contemporaries Lowell and Bishop, Scott often sought a prosodic middle ground between fixed iambic meter and free …
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Citation: Behlen, Charles William. "Winfield Townley Scott". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 September 2006 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3985, accessed 24 November 2024.]
