Elliptical Poetry or ellipticism is a literary-critical term introduced by critic Stephen Burt

Stephen Burt

Stephen Burt is a literary critic, poet, and a professor who teaches at Harvard University.-Elliptical Poetry:Burt received significant attention for coining the term "elliptical poetry" in a 1998 book review of Susan Wheeler's book, Smokes, in Boston Review magazine...

 in a 1998 essay in Boston Review

Boston Review

Boston Review is a bimonthly American political and literary magazine. The magazine covers, specifically, political debates, literature, and poetry...

on Susan Wheeler

Susan Wheeler

Susan Wheeler is an educator and award-winning poet whose poems have frequently appeared in anthologies. She currently teaches creative writing at Princeton University.Her published works include:...

, and expanded upon in an eponymous essay in American Letters & Commentary. Since the publication of that essay, and a number of accompanying responses in the same journal, "Elliptical Poetry", "ellipticism" and "elliptical poets" have entered the critical discussion of contemporary American poetry as a significant point of reference; Wheeler notes in an introduction to Burt at the Poetry Society

Poetry Society

The Poetry Society is a membership organisation, open to all, whose stated aim is "to promote the study, use and enjoyment of poetry".The Society was founded in London in February 1909 as the Poetry Recital Society, becoming the Poetry Society in 1912...

 "hearing, on several spooky occasions, in conferences with graduate students, 'but I want to be an elliptical poet.'"

The original statement of the notion by Burt in the Boston Review article suggested that "Elliptical poets try to manifest a person-who speaks the poem and reflects the poet-while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves. They are post-avant-gardist, or post-'postmodern': they have read (most of them) Stein's heirs, and the 'language writers,' and have chosen to do otherwise. Elliptical poems shift drastically between low (or slangy) and high (or naively 'poetic') diction. Some are lists of phrases beginning 'I am an X, I am a Y.' Ellipticism's favorite established poets are Dickinson, Berryman, Ashbery, and/or Auden; Wheeler draws on all four. The poets tell almost-stories, or almost-obscured ones. They are sardonic, angered, defensively difficult, or desperate; they want to entertain as thoroughly as, but not to resemble, television."

Discussing the term later in Poetry Magazine, Tony Hoagland

Tony Hoagland

Anthony Dey Hoagland is an American poet and writer. His poetry collection 2003, What Narcissism Means to Me, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and a...

 wrote, "Burt’s definition is quite general in order to encompass the diversity of the poetry he champions, but he gets the mania and the declarativeness right. Also the relentless dodging or obstruction of expectation."

C. D. Wright

C. D. Wright

Carolyn D. "C. D." Wright is an American poet.-Biography:Wright was born in Mountain Home, Arkansas to a chancery judge and a court reporter. She earned a BA from Memphis State College in 1971 and briefly attended law school before leaving to pursue an MFA from the University of Arkansas, which...

, a poet termed elliptical by Burt, states her nervousness about the label in an interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket Magazine: "Regarding the elliptical business, I’m less enthusiastic. But I do think it is a stab at authentication of poets who don’t belong to a team and whose work is reluctant to be either excluded or subsumed by one or the other, yet has sympathetic concerns to certain strains and not to others."

In a 2009 essay, also in Boston Review, Burt proposed that a poetic movement he called "The New Thing" has succeeded ellipticism.