You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore." In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.
Dalzell presents three of the major didactic poems in the classical canon: the De rerum natura of Lucretius, the Georgics of Virgil, and the Ars amatoria of Ovid, considering what tools are available for their understanding.
Presents literary criticism on the works of poets of all nations, cultures, and time periods. Critical essays are selected from leading sources, including published journals, magazines, books, reviews, diaries, newspapers, broadsheets, pamphlets, and scholarly papers.
"David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr’s a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-eyed, opinionated, and idiosyncratic guide to a vibrant but endangered art form, essential reading for anyone who loves poetry, and also for those of us who mostly just admire it from afar." —Tom Perrotta Award-winning New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr delivers an engaging, amusing, and stimulating tour through the world of poetry. With echoes of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless offers a smart and funny approach to appreciating an art form that many find difficult to embrace.
A 2018 National Book Award Finalist! A young girl in Harlem discovers slam poetry as a way to understand her mother's religion and her own relationship to the world in this debut novel by renowned slam poet Acevedo.
Explores the intricate relationships of postmodern poetics to the culture of network television, advertising layout, and the computer. Perloff argues that poetry today, like the visual arts and theater, is always "contaminated" by the language of mass media. Among the many poets Perloff discusses are John Ashbery, George Oppen, Susan Howe, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Charles Bernstein, Johanna Drucker, Steve McCaffery, and preeminently, John Cage--Publisher.
The discussion of each poem attends to the complexity of the poem's utterance, its historical contexts, and its broader implications for cultural meaning.Victorian Literature and Culture Series
This first collection of poems enacts the struggle of a young black gay man in his search for identity. Many voices haunt these poems: black and white, male and female, the oppressor's voice as well as the oppressed. The poet's aim, finally, is to rescue some portion of the drowned and the drowning.
Rhetorical Criticism and the Poetry of the Book of Job deals with the structure and meaning of the poems we find in Job 3-42,6. It is demonstrated that these poems exhibit a consistent pattern of cantos and strophes. The recurring structures often place the various thematic aspects of the texts in a different light. The analysis of the poems relates their rhetorical framework to the device of distant repetitive parallelism. These verbal repetitions appear to display distinct patterns and help to discover recurring and leading ideas. The final section offers a new theory on the demarcation of the (three) speech-cycles which give structure to chs. 4-31 and 38-41. This theory is of special importance for the interpretation of chs. 24-28. The work is of interest for all who study the forms and meaning of classical Hebrew poetry.
Tracing the rise of literary self-consciousness from the Elizabethan period to his own day, Eliot invites us to "start with the supposition that we do not know what poetry is, or what it does or ought to do, or of what use it is; and try to find out, in examining the relation of poetry to criticism, what the use of both of them is."