How do I read a poem? Do I really understand poetry? This comprehensive guide demystifies the world of poetry, exploring poetic forms and traditions which can at first seem bewildering. Showing how any reader can gain more pleasure from poetry, it looks at the ways in which poetry interacts with the language we use in our everyday lives and explores how poems use language and form to create meaning. Drawing on examples ranging from Chaucer to children's rhymes, Cole Porter to Carol Ann Duffy, and from around the English-speaking world, it looks at aspects including: how technical aspects such as rhythm and measures work how different tones of voice affect a poem how poetic language relates to everyday language how different types of poetry work, from sonnets to free verse how the form and 'space' of a poem contributes to its meaning. Poetry: The Basics is an invaluable and easy to read guide for anyone wanting to get to grips with reading and writing poetry.
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.
As in many households in the late eighteenth century, writing verses was a pastime with the Austen family, and the composition of ingenious riddles and charades provided a source of lively entertainment. This volume of verses by Jane Austen and her family contains all the known poems by Jane herself as well as a selection of work by her mother, her sister Cassandra, four of her brothers, her uncle James, her nieces Anna and Fanny, her nephew James Edward and other relatives. David Selwyn provides an introduction and full explanatory notes; his transcriptions, taken from autograph manuscripts or from the earliest copies, are precise in terms of spelling punctuation and layout.
Pattern poetry—poetry from before 1900 that fuses literature and visual art—has existed since the times of ancient Crete and Egypt. Less well known than modern visual poetry, pattern poetry has been produced in most European and American literatures, and, as close analogues, in many oriental literatures. This book tells the history of pattern poetry, documenting and classifying more than 2,000 works. Illustrations of each major genre of pattern poem are included. The book also explores related forms, such as graphic music notations, shaped prose, sound poetry, and poetic labyrinths, to name a few. A glossary, essays by two world authorities on the oriental analogues to the pattern poem, and the first full bibliography on pattern poetry complete the work. With this book, Dick Higgins has provided an indispensable tool for opening up the area of pattern poetry to the scholar and the lay reader alike, bringing order to what has been an obscure and confusing area, and delighting the eye and mind by casting light on these forgotten treasures.
The author of Under the Tuscan Sun shares her passion for poetry in an intriguing handbook that takes readers inside the art of reading and writing poems, discussing basic terminology and writing techniques that range from texture and sound to rhyme and repetition, accompanied by a thought-provoking selection of poems that demonstrate the art of poetry. Original. 25,000 first printing.
This 1999 book offers an original study of lyric form and social custom in the Elizabethan age. Ilona Bell explores the tendency of Elizabethan love poems not only to represent an amorous thought, but to conduct the courtship itself. Where studies have focused on courtiership, patronage and preferment at court, her focus is on love poetry, amorous courtship, and relations between Elizabethan men and women. The book examines the ways in which the tropes and rhetoric of love poetry were used to court Elizabethan women (not only at court and in the great houses, but in society at large) and how the women responded to being wooed, in prose, poetry and speech. Bringing together canonical male poets and women writers, Ilona Bell investigates a range of texts addressed to, written by, read, heard or transformed by Elizabethan women, and charts the beginnings of a female lyric tradition.
A.K. Ramanujan Represents The Quintessential Indian English Poet Engaged In A Relentless Quest For Self In The Welter Of Tradition And Contemporary Reality As Well As That For A Well-Adapted Poetic Idiom. His Poetry Refracts The Essential Indian Sensibility Fused Artistically With The Temper Of Modernity. Ramanujan Emerges Out Of His Artistic Predicament To A State Of Creative Freedom By Means Of Cultivating A Uniquely Personal Idiom. It Is Within This Thematic And Linguistic Framework That Ramanujan S Poetry Projects A Self Assuming A Number Of Identities In Time, Rendering The Quality Of Transparence.Applying Closely Textual, Formal, Socio-Cultural, Philosophic, Imagistic And Post-Colonial...
A study of the phenomenon of literary patronage, both non-imperial and imperial, during the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian (81-96 A.D.). This work centres on the "Epigrams" of Martial and the "Silvae" of Statius. The book deals not only with the relationships between poets and patrons, but also with the audiences and the functions of patron-oriented poetry. It includes discussions of such topics as "patronage" versus "friendship," the poetic "I," the role of poetry at symposia and festivals, dedication and publication, the influence of rhetoric on poetry, and the poetic representation of imperial power. The book should prove of interest not only to specialists in Roman poetry, but also to ancient historians and to students of literary patronage in other cultures. All Latin and Greek is translated.
The Romanticism that emerged after the American and French revolutions of 1776 and 1789 represented a new flowering of the imagination and the spirit, and a celebration of the soul of humanity with its capacity for love. This extraordinary collection sets the acknowledged genius of poems such as Blake's 'Tyger', Coleridge's 'Khubla Khan' and Shelley's 'Ozymandias' alongside verse from less familiar figures and women poets such as Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. We also see familiar poets in an unaccustomed light, as Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley demonstrate their comic skills, while Coleridge, Keats and Clare explore the Gothic and surreal.