The Work of Poetry

Author:   John Hollander
Publisher:   Columbia University Press
ISBN:  

9780231108973


Pages:   368
Publication Date:   01 September 1998
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
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The Work of Poetry


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Overview

"New and classic essays by one of America's most distinguished contemporary poet-critics, The Work of Poetry surveys an extraordinary range of poets, from Dante to May Swenson, and George Meredith to Marianne Moore, as well as works from the Psalms to A Child's Garden of Verses. By turns generous and uncompromising, Hollander champions the enduring force of poetry against the incursion of fashionable writing. This is an elegant, uncompromising affirmation of the extraordinary powers of poetic imagination from a poet whose poems have been hailed by J.D. McClatchy as ""ways of thinking on paper."""

Full Product Details

Author:   John Hollander
Publisher:   Columbia University Press
Imprint:   Columbia University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.80cm , Length: 23.00cm
Weight:   0.425kg
ISBN:  

9780231108973


ISBN 10:   0231108974
Pages:   368
Publication Date:   01 September 1998
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Language:   English

Table of Contents

Reviews

Densely allusive, richly autobiographical, digressively informative, and crowned by brilliant close readings that are Hollander's particular genius, these essays provide a crash course in poetry: what it has been, what it is, what it gives us when it is good, how poems work, what makes a poem masterful. -- Daria Donnelly, Commonweal This book shows Hollander at his best... Hollander... displays in these essays an acute sensitivity to the special ways poetic language is organized and the manner in which such organization influences perceptions of reality. This kind of sensitivity enables the reader to share something of that attitude to language that, according to Hollander, characterizes the poet. -- Poetics Today These essays are more engrossing and rewarding, for me, than the readings of particular poets which close the volume. -- Paul Dean, English Studies For me the great pleasure of Hollander's book lies in his discussion of specific poems. -- Ian Tromp, PN Review A critical response to poetry and, therefore, an exacting reading experience, but the rewards are diverse, as is the bounty. -- Library Journal Scholars interested in Hollander will welcome this book as the celebration of a long and accomplished career. -- Choice For every intelligent reader with a passion for poetry. -- Frank Kermode In some two dozen essays, the distinguished poet and Yale English professor Hollander explores poetry's 'pecularities, strangeness, ambiguities.'... Hollander's criticism is rigorous, idiosyncratic, and often bracingly contrarian, the product of an acute poetic imagination and intelligence. -- Publishers Weekly


Cautionary words about poetry from an idiosyncratic and surprising critic and poet. Hollander, usually regarded as a conservative observer of things poetic, both lives up to his reputation and defies it willingly in this essay collection. The Yale professor (and Bollingen Prize and MacArthur fellowship winner) predictably decries, for example, the dominance of creative-writing programs in contemporary America, blaming them in part for the rise of underachieving free verse and for an oversupply of poets who may not deserve the name. Free verse . . . is very easy to write if you don't know how, he comments, convinced that many self-styled poets don't. Good poets know how, he notes - as if we couldn't figure that out for ourselves. At his best, Hollander abandons contempt and complaint in favor of real eloquence and mindfulness. For instance, his essays about poets May Swenson and Elizabeth Bishop are models of insight and stylistic clarity and tact. Anyone interested in poetry or criticism must read them. Hollander on Swenson: Let words play with each other and they will do the imagination's work. As she herself observed in the preface to a selection of her poems that she'd made for children and that highlights the matter of puzzle and riddle in all poetry: 'Notice how a poet's games are called his works - and how the work you do to solve a poem is really play. . . .' Very, very good poetry does indeed make temporary poets of its readers, just as the inventiveness of poetry is itself so often a kind of interpretation. Hollander's comparisons and contrasts among poets are often beguiling, as in his consideration of Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the relationship between poetry and dreaming. His imagination is unpredictable and stimulating, especially when he does not assume too much about his audience's familiarity with, or views on, poetry. He smites, he laments, but he also enlightens. (Kirkus Reviews)


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