ABSTRACT

In 1962 Ian Hamilton, along with Michael Fried, John Fuller, Francis Hope, Martin Dodsworth, Colin Falck, and Gabriel Pearson, founded The Review, where nearly three dozen of Fried's early poems would appear over the eleven-year run of the journal. In the twenty-first century, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that some version of the commitment to autonomy has survived or reinvented itself. "Inside the Trap" is thus another example of a particularly dense engagement with the question of what counts—or counted for Fried circa 1965—as "located strictly within" the work. For "The rose light branching in the thunder orchard" describes the natural visual effect of light reflecting from Smith's rust-cured artworks as it reinscribes that effect within a figurative logic that only the poem can render. The internal order of relation among the parts of the work that for Fried marks its autonomy from the world is nevertheless a function of the form the work actually takes in the world.