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Author: Robert Pinsky Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400825156 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 108
Book Description
The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrongheaded as it is familiar. Pinsky, whose remarkable career as a poet itself undermines the view, writes that to portray poetry and democracy as enemies is to radically misconstrue both. The voice of poetry, he shows, resonates with profound themes at the very heart of democratic culture. There is no one in America better to write on this topic. One of the country's most accomplished poets, Robert Pinsky served an unprecedented two terms as America's Poet Laureate (1997-2000) and led the immensely popular multimedia Favorite Poem Project, which invited Americans to submit and read aloud their favorite poems. Pinsky draws on his experiences and on characteristically sharp and elegant observations of individual poems to argue that expecting poetry to compete with show business is to mistake its greatest democratic strength--its intimate, human scale--as a weakness. As an expression of individual voice, a poem implicitly allies itself with ideas about individual dignity that are democracy's bedrock, far more than is mass participation. Yet poems also summon up communal life.. Even the most inward-looking work imagines a reader. And in their rhythms and cadences poems carry in their very bones the illusion and dynamic of call and response. Poetry, Pinsky writes, cannot help but mediate between the inner consciousness of the individual reader and the outer world of other people. As part of the entertainment industry, he concludes, poetry will always be small and overlooked. As an art--and one that is inescapably democratic--it is massive and fundamental.
Author: Robert Pinsky Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400825156 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 108
Book Description
The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrongheaded as it is familiar. Pinsky, whose remarkable career as a poet itself undermines the view, writes that to portray poetry and democracy as enemies is to radically misconstrue both. The voice of poetry, he shows, resonates with profound themes at the very heart of democratic culture. There is no one in America better to write on this topic. One of the country's most accomplished poets, Robert Pinsky served an unprecedented two terms as America's Poet Laureate (1997-2000) and led the immensely popular multimedia Favorite Poem Project, which invited Americans to submit and read aloud their favorite poems. Pinsky draws on his experiences and on characteristically sharp and elegant observations of individual poems to argue that expecting poetry to compete with show business is to mistake its greatest democratic strength--its intimate, human scale--as a weakness. As an expression of individual voice, a poem implicitly allies itself with ideas about individual dignity that are democracy's bedrock, far more than is mass participation. Yet poems also summon up communal life.. Even the most inward-looking work imagines a reader. And in their rhythms and cadences poems carry in their very bones the illusion and dynamic of call and response. Poetry, Pinsky writes, cannot help but mediate between the inner consciousness of the individual reader and the outer world of other people. As part of the entertainment industry, he concludes, poetry will always be small and overlooked. As an art--and one that is inescapably democratic--it is massive and fundamental.
Author: Angus FLETCHER Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674037014 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 331
Book Description
Intense, resonant, and deeply literary, this account of an American poetics shows how today's consumerist and conformist culture subverts the imagination of a free people. Poetry, the author maintains, is central to any coherent vision of life.
Author: Mark Edmundson Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674258983 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
In the midst of a crisis of democracy, we have much to learn from Walt Whitman’s journey toward egalitarian selfhood. Walt Whitman knew a great deal about democracy that we don’t. Most of that knowledge is concentrated in one stunning poem, Song of Myself. Esteemed cultural and literary thinker Mark Edmundson offers a bold reading of the 1855 poem, included here in its entirety. He finds in the poem the genesis and development of a democratic spirit, for the individual and the nation. Whitman broke from past literature that he saw as “feudal”: obsessed with the noble and great. He wanted instead to celebrate the common and everyday. Song of Myself does this, setting the terms for democratic identity and culture in America. The work captures the drama of becoming an egalitarian individual, as the poet ascends to knowledge and happiness by confronting and overcoming the major obstacles to democratic selfhood. In the course of his journey, the poet addresses God and Jesus, body and soul, the love of kings, the fear of the poor, and the fear of death. The poet’s consciousness enlarges; he can see more, comprehend more, and he has more to teach. In Edmundson’s account, Whitman’s great poem does not end with its last line. Seven years after the poem was published, Whitman went to work in hospitals, where he attended to the Civil War’s wounded, sick, and dying. He thus became in life the democratic individual he had prophesied in art. Even now, that prophecy gives us words, thoughts, and feelings to feed the democratic spirit of self and nation.
Author: Thomas Riggs Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing LLC ISBN: 0737763787 Category : Young Adult Nonfiction Languages : en Pages : 210
Book Description
This informative edition explores Walt Whitman's poetry through the lens of democracy. Chapters include an examination of Whitman's life and influences, a look at key ideas related to democracy in Whitman's poetry, and a series of essays that explore topics such as Whitman's views of democratic comradeship, the role of bonds between men, Whitman's approach to patriotism, and Whitman's contradictory views on slavery and race. Readers are also presented with contemporary perspectives on democracy, such as the importance of an informed electorate and the impact of American individualism on contemporary politics.
Author: Ellis Jonathan Ellis Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 1474421350 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 569
Book Description
A comprehensive and original guide to Elizabeth Bishop's poetry and other writing, including literary criticism and prose fictionCelebrating Elizabeth Bishop as an international writer with allegiances to various countries and national traditions, this collection of essays explores how Bishop moves between literal geographies like Nova Scotia, New England, Key West and Brazil and more philosophical categories like home and elsewhere, human and animal, insider and outsider. The book covers all aspects and periods of the author's career, from her early writing in the 1930s to the late poems finished after Geography III and those works published after her death. It also examines how Bishop's work has been read and reinterpreted by contemporary writers. Key FeaturesProvides a companion to Bishop's entire artistic oeuvre, including letter writing, literary criticism and short story writingOffers a sustained consideration of Bishop's identity politics, including the role of raceStudies Bishop's influence on contemporary culture
Author: Amy Paeth Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231550790 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 205
Book Description
The American Poet Laureate shows how the state has been the silent center of poetic production in the United States since World War II. It is the first history of the national poetry office, the U.S. poet laureate, highlighting the careers of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Pinsky, Tracy K. Smith, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Joy Harjo at the nation’s Capitol. It is also a history of how these state poets participated in national arts programming during the Cold War. Drawing on previously unexplored archival materials at the Library of Congress and materials at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Amy Paeth describes the interactions of federal bodies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the National Endowment for the Arts, with literary organizations and with private patrons, including “Prozac heiress” Ruth Lilly. The consolidation of public and private interests is crucial to the development of state verse culture, recognizable at the first National Poetry Festival in 1962, which followed Robert Frost’s “Mission to Moscow,” and which became dominant in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The American Poet Laureate contributes to a growing body of institutional and sociological approaches to U.S. literary production in the postwar era and demonstrates how poetry has played a uniquely important, and largely underacknowledged, role in the cultural front of the Cold War.
Author: Jeffrey Wainwright Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317585240 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 217
Book Description
Now in its third edition Poetry: The Basics remains an engaging exploration of the world of poetry. Drawing on examples ranging from Chaucer to children's rhymes, Cole Porter to Carol Ann Duffy, and from around the English-speaking world, it shows how any reader can understand and gain more pleasure from poetry. Exploring poetry’s relationship to everyday language and introducing major genres and technical aspects in an accessible way, it is a clear introduction to how different types of poetry work through the study of details and of whole poems. With a revised chapter on the different practices and ideas in the writing of poetry now, including sections on film poetry and digital poetics, this is a must read for all students of English Literature.
Author: Jeffrey Wainwright Publisher: Psychology Press ISBN: 9780415287630 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
"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; and how the form and 'space' of a poem contribute 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."--Jacket.
Author: Karen L. Kilcup Publisher: University of Michigan Press ISBN: 0472126016 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 426
Book Description
Throughout the 19th century, American poetry was a profoundly populist literary form. It circulated in New England magazines and Southern newspapers; it was read aloud in taverns, homes, and schools across the country. Antebellum reviewers envisioned poetry as the touchstone democratic genre, and their Civil War–era counterparts celebrated its motivating power, singing poems on battlefields. Following the war, however, as criticism grew more professionalized and American literature emerged as an academic subject, reviewers increasingly elevated difficult, dispassionate writing and elite readers over their supposedly common counterparts, thereby separating “authentic” poetry for intellectuals from “popular” poetry for everyone else.\ Conceptually and methodologically unique among studies of 19th-century American poetry, Who Killed American Poetry? not only charts changing attitudes toward American poetry, but also applies these ideas to the work of representative individual poets. Closely analyzing hundreds of reviews and critical essays, Karen L. Kilcup tracks the century’s developing aesthetic standards and highlights the different criteria reviewers used to assess poetry based on poets’ class, gender, ethnicity, and location. She shows that, as early as the 1820s, critics began to marginalize some kinds of emotional American poetry, a shift many scholars have attributed primarily to the late-century emergence of affectively restrained modernist ideals. Mapping this literary critical history enables us to more readily apprehend poetry’s status in American culture—both in the past and present—and encourages us to scrutinize the standards of academic criticism that underwrite contemporary aesthetics and continue to constrain poetry’s appeal. Who American Killed Poetry? enlarges our understanding of American culture over the past two hundred years and will interest scholars in literary studies, historical poetics, American studies, gender studies, canon criticism, genre studies, the history of criticism, and affect studies. It will also appeal to poetry readers and those who enjoy reading about American cultural history.
Author: Robert Pinsky
Author: Robert Pinsky
Author: Angus FLETCHER
Author: Mark Edmundson
Author: Thomas Riggs
Author: Ellis Jonathan Ellis
Author: Amy Paeth
Author: Matthew Sweney
Author: Jeffrey Wainwright
Author: Jeffrey Wainwright
Author: Karen L. Kilcup