Download or read book A Little History of Poetry written by John Carey and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature The Times and Sunday Times, Best Books of 2020 “[A] fizzing, exhilarating book.”—Sebastian Faulks, Sunday Times What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work—over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. But this Little History is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem “great” in the first place. For readers both young and old, this little history shines a light for readers on the richness of the world’s poems—and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.

Download or read book The Invention of Poetry written by Adam Czerniawski and published by Salt Pub. This book was released on 2005 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: âe~Adam Czerniawskiâe(tm)s poetry springs from a conjunction of Polish and English (or perhaps European) culture. Deeply rooted in the Polish language, he is at the same time a poet of universal themes observed from a wide perspective of the Western world. I would even claim that this poetry springs from a different basis of culture and literary tradition, that he has managed to set himself free from many complexes of contemporary Polish poetry, to grasp and see them from a global perspective. Additionally, there is his special position as a poet standing outside the émigré cultural life, which gives him the advantage of distance, of reserve and of being above the current disputes and entanglements. The art which he practises enables us to count him among poets of culture full of erudition and various tropes which bear witness to his inheriting the great tradition of European culture.âe(tm)âe"Konstanty PieÅ,,kosz, Literary criticâe~My favourite poems by Adam Czerniawski include âeoeSeaside Holidayâe , âeoeInterior Topographyâe (one of his best poems), âeoeYou and Iâe , âeoeManâe , âeoeScience Fictionâe , âeoeListening to a Schubert Quartetâe , âeoeWorldâe , âeoeBridgeâe , âeoeFishâe , âeoeTriangleâe , âeoeA View of Delftâe , âeoeEvening, or a Field of Visionâe , âeoeToken of Remembranceâe and âeoeGolden Ageâe . These poems display a dialectical synthesis of feeling and awareness; without falling below the level of the authorâe(tm)s understanding âe" and letâe(tm)s note that it is a philosophical understanding rare among Polish poets (MiÅ,osz is a philosopher of a totally different kind) âe" these poems do not leave feelings behind, and this is precisely what works in their favour.âe(tm)âe"Bogdan Czaykowski, Poet and scholarâe~Consistently labelled in Polish criticism as a âeoepoet of culture,âe Czerniawski, like CzesÅ,aw MiÅ,osz, belongs to the category of writers who express their struggle with culture and history in profoundly personal terms. His poetry is marked by a return to mythological topoi (e.g., âeoeLoveâe ) and to such classical motifs as ars longa vita brevis (e.g., âeoeToken of Remembranceâe ). These returns, however, offer no consolation for the sense of historical and existential displacement; rather, culture tempts with the promise of aesthetic redemption (in this, Czerniawski also resembles Zbigniew Herbert) but ultimately agitates by bringing into the open that from which one longs to escape âe" the palpability of history, of âeoetoday, though somewhat far.âe Czerniawskiâe(tm)s sense of history reflects both the experience of his generation and his own âeoeobsessive memory [of an] annihilated childhood.âe He comments, for instance, on the traumatic divide in his biography, âeoefor those tainted with the consciousness of âe~other daysâe(tm) biography falls into before and after.âe He recalls the emotional impact of the outbreak of the war on the child that he was: âeoeSo not even a global picture of the September campaign, but simply stray scenes rooted in the memory of the child. They are enough. And who would have thought that already at that age it is possible to shoulder the humiliation of an entire people?âe (âeoeThe Ages Speak, or what''s new in Historyâe ).âe~Higgins strives to be faithful to Czerniawskiâe(tm)s style and tone (including the use of British English to reflect the author''s environment), and those able to follow both the Polish and English can appreciate the consistency of his renditions. Higginsâe(tm)s translations read smoothly and show respect for the original. Similar qualities come across in Higginsâe(tm)s sensitive introduction to this generally laudable volume.âe(tm)âe"Prof. Joanna NiÅ1⁄4yÅ,,skaâe~Thus the reader will find here not only the long and the short of him âe" as in the concise âeoeOxfordâe (an almost sentimental statement of the poet''s affection for a mythic England) and the extensive âeoeMirrors and Reflectionsâe (a moving meditation on being in the world) âe" but also the more familiar middle ground, Czerniawskiâe(tm)s preferred poetic dwelling-place, where the lyric readily admits other modes of writing without necessarily giving up its own character altogether. Here the reader will find poems as different from one another as âeoeYou and Iâe (an unsentimental celebration of childhood pleasure and friendship), âeoeCape of False Hopeâe (a striking portrait of life in an imaginary European colony), âeoetriangleâe (a brief parable on order and cruelty), âeoeTeatro della guerraâe (a dark look at the homologies of war, theatre, and children''s games), and the remarkable prose poems from the cycle âeoeCommentariesâe (essays on such matters as memory and oblivion, the poetâe(tm)s reading both early and late, and the nature of artistic perception). Indeed, there is nothing quite like these poems in English, although it is possible to gesture towards some analogies: the brilliantly opaque poems of John Ashbery, for instance, offer a partial analogy of their probing and self-undoing manner, if not of the sensibility they conjure up, while the wittily erudite poems of Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon offer a partial analogy of their heterogeneous cultural and historical matter, if not of their tone and formal qualities. For Czerniawskiâe(tm)s poetics derives in part from a tradition little known outside Polish literature, the tradition established by Cyprian Norwid (1821âe"1883), who is a kind of combined Hopkins, Dickinson and Eliot-cum-Pound. In Norwidâe(tm)s view, âeoea perfect lyric should be like a plaster cast: those boundaries where forms miss each other and leave cracks ought to be preserved and not smoothed over with a knife.âe But where Norwid chose a sculptural analogy, strangely thinking of his own dynamic verse in spatial terms, Czerniawski would choose a musical one, thinking in terms of the temporal and the dramatic, as in Beethoven or Bartok, or even in some forms of jazz. Here the preserved cracks become dissonant notes deliberately exploited, and the plaster cast, the compositional whole that contains and attempts to govern them.âe(tm)âe"Iain Higgins, Introduction to The Invention of Poetry

Download or read book Dear Editor written by Joseph Parisi and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2002-10-17 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects more than six hundred letters to and from the editors of "Poetry" that were written about and by such figures as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Wallace Stevens.

Download or read book A History of American Poetry written by Richard Gray and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-03-02 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of American Poetry presents a comprehensive exploration of the development of American poetic traditions from their pre-Columbian origins to the present day. Offers a detailed and accessible account of the entire range of American poetry Situates the story of American poetry within crucial social and historical contexts, and places individual poets and poems in the relevant intertextual contexts Explores and interprets American poetry in terms of the international positioning and multicultural character of the United States Provides readers with a means to understand the individual works and personalities that helped to shape one of the most significant bodies of literature of the past few centuries

Download or read book Poetry After the Invention of Am rica written by A. Ajens and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-10-26 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays traces the emergence of the Western poem from the standpoint of its collision with "American" otherness, particularly, the Latin American tradition. Unlike works extending Western conceptions of writing or searching for an alleged American ethnopoetics, this book approaches literature as a Western invention and, in turn, seeks out correspondences between traditions

Download or read book The Columbia History of American Poetry written by Jay Parini and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1993-12-23 with total page 936 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: -- New York Times Book Review

Download or read book The Invention of Private Life written by Sudipta Kaviraj and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-17 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume, which lie at the intersection of the study of literature, social theory, and intellectual history, locate serious reflections on modernity's complexities in the vibrant currents of modern Indian literature, particularly in the realms of fiction, poetry, and autobiography. Sudipta Kaviraj shows that Indian writers did more than adopt new literary trends in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They deployed these innovations to interrogate fundamental philosophical questions of modernity. Issues central to modern European social theory grew into significant themes within Indian literary reflection, such as the influence of modernity on the nature of the self, the nature of historicity, the problem of evil, the character of power under the conditions of modern history, and the experience of power as felt by an individual subject of the modern state. How does modern politics affect the personality of a sensitive individual? Is love possible between intensely self-conscious people, and how do individuals cope with the transience of affections or the fragility of social ties? Kaviraj argues that these inquiries inform the heart of modern Indian literary tradition and that writers, such as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sibnath Sastri, performed immeasurably important work helping readers to think through the predicament of modern times.

Download or read book The Cambridge History of English Poetry written by Michael O'Neill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-29 with total page 1117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary-historical account of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon writings to the present.

Download or read book Hand in Hand written by Carol Ann Duffy and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2001 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For this collection, the prize-winning poet, Carol Ann Duffy, selected 40 of the best world poets writing today - 20 men and 20 women - and invited each of them to select a love poem written by the opposite sex, to appear opposite their own love poem. Poems from other centuries are included.

Download or read book Painting Poetry and the Invention of Tenderness in the Early Roman Empire written by Hérica Valladares and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tenderness is not a notion commonly associated with the Romans, whose mythical origin was attributed to brutal rape. Yet, as Hérica Valladares argues in this ground-breaking study, in the second half of the first century BCE Roman poets, artists, and their audience became increasingly interested in describing, depicting, and visualizing the more sentimental aspects of amatory experience. During this period, we see two important and simultaneous developments: Latin love elegy crystallizes as a poetic genre, while a new style in Roman wall painting emerges. Valladares' book is the first to correlate these two phenomena properly, showing that they are deeply intertwined. Rather than postulating a direct correspondence between images and texts, she offers a series of mutually reinforcing readings of painting and poetry that ultimately locate the invention of a new romantic ideal within early imperial debates about domesticity and the role of citizens in Roman society.

Download or read book The Dangers of Poetry written by Kevin M. Jones and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry has long dominated the cultural landscape of modern Iraq, simultaneously representing the literary pinnacle of high culture and giving voice to the popular discourses of mass culture. As the favored genre of culture expression for religious clerics, nationalist politicians, leftist dissidents, and avant-garde intellectuals, poetry critically shaped the social, political, and cultural debates that consumed the Iraqi public sphere in the twentieth century. The popularity of poetry in modern Iraq, however, made it a dangerous practice that carried serious political consequences and grave risks to dissident poets. The Dangers of Poetry is the first book to narrate the social history of poetry in the modern Middle East. Moving beyond the analysis of poems as literary and intellectual texts, Kevin M. Jones shows how poems functioned as social acts that critically shaped the cultural politics of revolutionary Iraq. He narrates the history of three generations of Iraqi poets who navigated the fraught relationship between culture and politics in pursuit of their own ambitions and agendas. Through this historical analysis of thousands of poems published in newspapers, recited in popular demonstrations, and disseminated in secret whispers, this book reveals the overlooked contribution of these poets to the spirit of rebellion in modern Iraq.

Download or read book The Cambridge History of American Poetry written by Alfred Bendixen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-27 with total page 1326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge History of American Poetry offers a comprehensive exploration of the development of American poetic traditions from their beginnings until the end of the twentieth century. Bringing together the insights of fifty distinguished scholars, this literary history emphasizes the complex roles that poetry has played in American cultural and intellectual life, detailing the variety of ways in which both public and private forms of poetry have met the needs of different communities at different times. The Cambridge History of American Poetry recognizes the existence of multiple traditions and a dramatically fluid canon, providing current perspectives on both major authors and a number of representative figures whose work embodies the diversity of America's democratic traditions.

Download or read book Attack of the Difficult Poems written by Charles Bernstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-04-30 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Bernstein is our postmodern jester of American poesy, equal part surveyor of democratic vistas and scholar of avant-garde sensibilities. In a career spanning thirty-five years and forty books, he has challenged and provoked us with writing that is decidedly unafraid of the tensions between ordinary and poetic language, and between everyday life and its adversaries. Attack of the Difficult Poems, his latest collection of essays, gathers some of his most memorably irreverent work while addressing seriously and comprehensively the state of contemporary humanities, the teaching of unconventional forms, fresh approaches to translation, the history of language media, and the connections between poetry and visual art. Applying an array of essayistic styles, Attack of the Difficult Poems ardently engages with the promise of its title. Bernstein introduces his key theme of the difficulty of poems and defends, often in comedic ways, not just difficult poetry but poetry itself. Bernstein never loses his ingenious ability to argue or his consummate attention to detail. Along the way, he offers a wide-ranging critique of literature’s place in the academy, taking on the vexed role of innovation and approaching it from the perspective of both teacher and practitioner. From blues artists to Tin Pan Alley song lyricists to Second Wave modernist poets, The Attack of the Difficult Poems sounds both a battle cry and a lament for the task of the language maker and the fate of invention.

Download or read book The Tradition written by Jericho Brown and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award "100 Notable Books of the Year," The New York Times Book Review One Book, One Philadelphia Citywide Reading Program Selection, 2021 "By some literary magic—no, it's precision, and honesty—Brown manages to bestow upon even the most public of subjects the most intimate and personal stakes."—Craig Morgan Teicher, “'I Reject Walls': A 2019 Poetry Preview” for NPR “A relentless dismantling of identity, a difficult jewel of a poem.“—Rita Dove, in her introduction to Jericho Brown’s “Dark” (featured in the New York Times Magazine in January 2019) “Winner of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Brown's hard-won lyricism finds fire (and idyll) in the intersection of politics and love for queer Black men.”—O, The Oprah Magazine Named a Lit Hub “Most Anticipated Book of 2019” One of Buzzfeed’s “66 Books Coming in 2019 You’ll Want to Keep Your Eyes On” The Rumpus poetry pick for “What to Read When 2019 is Just Around the Corner” One of BookRiot’s “50 Must-Read Poetry Collections of 2019” Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we’ve become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown’s mastery, and his invention of the duplex—a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues—is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.

Download or read book The Invention of a Discourse written by Jeanne Hong Zhang and published by Leiden University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Under Briggflatts written by Donald Davie and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1989-10-12 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under Briggflatts is a history of the last thirty years of British poetry with necessary excursions into other areas: criticism, philosophy, translation, and non-British English poetries. It has grown naturally out of Donald Davie's immediate involvement with new writing as a poet, reviewer, teacher, and reader. He has reassessed the writers who have most engaged his attention, revised his reviews, and supplemented earlier material with much that is new. Under Briggflatts provides a narrative that is remarkable in scope and generous in tone. By combining close readings of specific poems and more general considerations of style, form, and context, Davie's account is characteristically elegant, precise, and uncompromising. Under Briggflatts is organized in three large chapters, one devoted to each decade. In the 1960s, Davie pays particular attention to the work of Austin Clarke, Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman McCaig, Keith Douglas, Edwin Muir, Basil Bunting (the gurus whose prose writings helped catalyze the traumatic events of 1968), Elaine Feinstein, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Philip Larkin, Charles Tomlinson, Thomas Kinsella, and Ted Hughes. The second chapter follows these figures into the new decade and explores the work of (among others) Thom Gunn, C. H. Sisson, R. S. Thomas, John Betjeman, and such themes as women's poetry, translation, poetic theory, and the later impact of T. S. Eliot and of Edward Thomas. Perhaps the most controversial chapter is the third, in which David—without abandoning the poets already introduced—assesses Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, and Seamus Heaney, and looks too at the recovery of Ivor Gurney's poems, at Ted Hughes as Laureate, the posthumous work of Sylvia Townsend Warner, the burgeoning Hardy industry, and the critical writings of Kenneth Cox.

Download or read book My Silver Planet written by Daniel Tiffany and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the hidden origins of kitsch in poetry from the eighteenth century. Taking its title from John Keats, My Silver Planet contends that the problem of elite poetry’s relation to popular culture bears the indelible mark of its turbulent incorporation of vernacular poetry—a legacy shaped by nostalgia, contempt, and fraudulence. Daniel Tiffany reactivates and fundamentally redefines the concept of kitsch, freeing it from modernist misapprehension and ridicule, by tracing its origin to poetry’s alienation from the emergent category of literature. Tiffany excavates the forgotten history of poetry’s relation to kitsch, beginning with the exuberant revival of archaic (and often spurious) ballads in Britain in the early eighteenth century. In these controversial events of poetic imposture, Tiffany identifies a submerged pact—in opposition to the bourgeois values of literature—between elite and vernacular poetries. Tiffany argues that the ballad revival—the earliest explicit formation of what we now call popular culture—sparked a perilous but seemingly irresistible flirtation (among elite audiences) with poetic forgery that endures today in the ambiguity of the kitsch artifact: Is it real or fake, art or kitsch? He goes on to trace the genealogy of kitsch in texts ranging from nursery rhymes and poetic melodrama to the lyric commodities of Baudelaire. He scrutinizes the fascist “paradise” inscribed in Ezra Pound’s Cantos as well as the avant-garde poetry of the New York School and its debt to pop and “plastic” art. By exposing and elaborating the historical poetics of kitsch, My Silver Planet transforms our sense of kitsch as a category of material culture.