Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry concentrates on the challenges posed to poetry by modernist painting: how could the poets adapt to the painters' ability to recast our understanding of the psyche's needs, powers, and social dependencies, and how could they share the painter's efforts to find alternatives to what seemed the inescapably ideological grounds for all value claims? By stressing the poets' ways of making the syntax of art works carry semantic force, this orientation generates a much more dynamic, philosophically stimulating sense of modernist poetry than the ones offered by the dominant styles of political critique.