The Art of Poetry, volume 4, offers sharp and engaging critical essays on all the poems from the pre-1900 selection of AQA's A-level English Literature poetry anthology, Love Through the Ages. Alongside the essays are teaching and revision ideas to stimulate students and teachers as well as advice on writing comparative essays and tackling unseen poetry.
A new collection of essays by the legendary literary scholar and critic. In the year of his one-hundredth birthday, preeminent literary critic, scholar, and teacher M. H. Abrams brings us a collection of nine new and recent essays that challenge the reader to think about poetry in new ways. In these essays, three of them never before published, Abrams engages afresh with pivotal figures in intellectual and literary history, among them Kant, Keats, and Hazlitt. The centerpiece of the volume is Abrams’s eloquent and incisive essay “The Fourth Dimension of a Poem” on the pleasure of reading poems aloud, accompanied by online recordings of Abrams’s revelatory readings of poems such as William Wordsworth’s “Surprised by Joy,” Alfred Tennyson’s “Here Sleeps the Crimson Petal,” and Ernest Dowson’s “Cynara.” The collection begins with a foreword by Abrams’s former student Harold Bloom.
Kenneth Koch, in the words of editor Ron Padgett, wrote poetry that became a part of “the mystery and pleasure of being alive.” A center of the New York School, he gained notoriety by mocking the stodginess and academicism of much mid-century verse. This enthralling selection encompasses the full range of Koch’s poetry, and includes such already classic works as “Fresh Air” (his devastatingly satirical assault on mid-1950s poetic conformism), “The Pleasure of Peace” (with its defiant assertion that “One single piece of pink mint chewing gum contains more pleasures / Than the whole rude gallery of war!”), “The Art of Poetry,” his astonishing and light-footed survey of the aims and methods of poetry, and poems from the late collection New Addresses, including “To World War Two,” “To Psychoanalysis,” and “To the French Language.” A poet at once directly accessible and deeply mysterious, Kenneth Koch was the master of an art of surprise in which the world is constantly reimagined. About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.
`The conviction, pleasures and gratitude of committed reading are evident in his affirmation of the poetic contract between readers and writers.' Andrea Brady, Poetry Review --
Living Poems, Writing Lives engages a poet's vision, heart and craft in embrace of the art of conscious living. The integration of literary, psychological and spiritual perspectives takes the reader on an invaluable journey of self-discovery. Chapter-ending exercises and meditations, a 15-billion-year time line, and an extensive annotated bibliography complement Reggie Marra's unique perspective on the roles of poetic devices and imagination in promoting a culture of peace that begins with, and nurtures, an ongoing inquiry into the self. Poets who feel drawn to look within, and anyone charmed by poetry's allure, will find a home in these pages. CONTENTS Introduction 1 Structure: Knowing Our Foundations 2 The Line: Honoring Episodes and Building a Life 3 Imagery: Juxtaposing Words and Deeds 4 Point of View: Who Are We, Really? 5 Metaphor/(Simile): Life Is (Like) a Gift...a Journey...a Trial...a War? 6 Drama: Recognizing the Reality and Theater of Conflict 7 Diction: The Choices We Make 8 Punctuation: Personality and the Sentence of Life 9 Rhythm: Going With (and Controlling) the Flow 10 Revision: Interpretation, Truthfulness, and the Story of a Life 11 Theme: Big Pictures and Unifying Ideas 12 Texture: Integrity, Quality, and the Overall Feel 13 Completion: Illusions, Endings, and the Denial of Death Appendix I: Developmental Theory Appendix II: Time Line Notes Annotated Bibliography Index INTRODUCTION The various poetic devices that we use to write and interpret poetry have value beyond the world of the poet. Structure, line, imagery, point of view, metaphor, drama, diction, punctuation, rhythm, revision, theme, texture, and completion are as essential for living a conscious life as they are for writing or interpreting a great (or ordinary) poem. While the book focuses on conscious living, the exercises that conclude each chapter apply to both poetry writing and the search for the True Self, and include basic approaches to meditation. Each chapter first presents the application of its topic to "our poet," using examples from Shakespeare to contemporary poets; then to "our self," using, among others, the work of Ken Wilber, Brother David Steindl-Rast, Stephen Levine, and Thomas Merton. The annotated bibliography at the book's conclusion lists over 150 entries, including all references used in the book. Appendix I, a brief essay, includes a chart of selected developmental theories, including Piaget, Maslow, Kohlberg, Fowler, Beck and Cowan, and Wilber, among others, which are especially relevant for Chapters Four and Thirteen. Appendix II is a selective time line, which presents significant events, relevant to this book, that have occurred over the past 15 billion years (or so). The "spirit" and "self" components throughout this book have their foundation in the what has come to be known as an "all-quadrant, all-level, all-line, all-state, all-type," or "integral" approach. Living Poems, Writing Lives presents a unique path toward recognizing Spirit within. CHAPTER ONE: STRUCTURE: Knowing Our Foundations explores the possibilities of formal and free verse that are available to our poet, and uses the problem/resolution/uniformity of the sonnet as the primary example of formal verse. Other examples include the cycles and compression of the sestina; the progressive repetition of the pantoum; the self-imposed form of structured free verse; and the potential, freedom and danger of unstructured free verse. Our self explores her chosen and imposed structures as they apply to issues such as money, time, work and vocat
Poetry pushes metaphor to the limit. Consider how many different, dynamic, and interconnected dimensions (e.g., text, rhyme, rhythm, sound, and many more) a poem has, and how they all play a role in the ways (metaphorical) meaning is constructed. There is probably no other genre that relies so much on the creator’s ability to get his or her message across while, at the same time, leaving enough room for the interpreters to find out for themselves what a poem means to them, what emotions and feelings it evokes, and which experiences it conveys. This book uses interviews, questionnaires and think-aloud protocols to investigate the meanings and functions of metaphors from a poet’s perspective and to explore how readers interpret and engage with this poetry. Besides the theoretical contribution to the field of metaphor studies, this monograph presents numerous practical implications for a systematic exploration of metaphors in contemporary poetry and beyond.
This book presents a survey and evaluation of Cavafy’s poetical work with an emphasis on his historical and didactic poems. The poet prefers to describe events while they are still in progress. We, the readers, know from History that the game is lost and we feel like wise men hearing “the mystic sound of the approaching events”. We see the future of that era which is the past of our era. For the first time, the relation of Cavafy’s poetics to Aristotle’s Poetics is examined. Some of Cavafy’s techniques, including the use of details and of an intervening narrator are also discussed in detail, showing that, through such devices, he succeeds in taking the reader back to the living past. The basic motifs of Cavafy’s poetry are also systematically analysed, under the light of his proclaimed manner of revisiting the same areas by completing, illuminating or revealing the oppositions of the initial form. In addition, new translations of Cavafy’s most well-known poems, including “Thermopylae”, “Ithaca”, “Expecting the Barbarians”, “Voices”, “Desires”, “Walls”, and “The City”, are appended to this volume.
This book celebrates and illuminates the poetry and prose of Brenda Marie Osbey. Featuring chapters by distinguished critics of African American poetry and prose, it places particular emphasis on the role of New Orleans, sexuality, gender, madness, death, and remembrance in her oeuvre, and on Osbey’s eloquent revision of hemispheric history.
