Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, more expressive than logical, more meditative than given to coherent argument. And yet, in each of the four very different poets she considers here, Helen Vendler reveals a style of thinking in operation; although they may prefer different means, she argues, all poets of any value are thinkers. The four poets taken up in this volume--Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats--come from three centuries and three nations, and their styles of thinking are characteristically idiosyncratic. Vendler shows us Pope performing as a satiric miniaturizer, remaking in verse the form of the essay, Whitman writing as a poet of repetitive insistence for whom thinking must be followed by rethinking, Dickinson experimenting with plot to characterize life's unfolding, and Yeats thinking in images, using montage in lieu of argument. With customary lucidity and spirit, Vendler traces through these poets' lines to find evidence of thought in lyric, the silent stylistic measures representing changes of mind, the condensed power of poetic thinking. Her work argues against the reduction of poetry to its (frequently well-worn) themes and demonstrates, instead, that there is always in admirable poetry a strenuous process of thinking, evident in an evolving style--however ancient the theme--that is powerful and original.

This collection brings together some of the most prominent critics of contemporary poetry and some of the most significant poets working in the English language today, to offer a critical assessment of the nature and function of poetic thought. Working at once with questions of form, literary theory and philosophy, this volume gives an extraordinarily diverse, original and mobile account of the kind of ‘thinking’ that poetry can do. The conviction that moves through the collection as a whole is that poetry is not an addition to thought, nor a vehicle to express a given idea, nor an ornamental language in which thinking might find itself couched. Rather, all the essays suggest that poetry itself thinks, in ways that other forms of expression cannot, thus making new intellectual, political and cultural formulations possible. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

An entertaining guide to history's most influential and inspiring poets – from Homer and Sappho to Shakespeare and Frank O'Hara – and how they can teach us to better understand the world around us. How did the greatest poets in history make the world anew? And what can we learn from the magic, wisdom and humour of their poetry? From the genius of the Ancient Greeks through to the love poetry and metaphysics of the Renaissance, through to the New York poets of the 20th century, this is the ultimate guide to the greatest writers of the human age. Through short, biographical portraits, poet and writer Dai George provides an entertaining introduction to the great works of poetry, and a welcoming guide to how we can read them. He addresses questions poets have grappled with: How can we truly describe the world? How can we express love, grief or friendship? How can poetry help us to understand justice, dreams or anger? This book paints vivid pictures of a global selection of renowned poets throughout history: from Sappho, Li Bai and Rumi, to William Shakespeare and John Donne, to Frank O Hara, Pablo Neruda and Sylvia Plath. George also seeks to re-examine the canon, traditionally dominated by Western, white and male poets, and bring to light major figures from other important cultures and communities, including China, India and the Caribbean.

This volume of essays seeks to establish a dialogue between poetry and philosophy where each could be said to read the other and announces important new paths for a reinvigorated study of lyric poetry in the decades to come.

Broad-ranging and pluralistically investigative, the essays in Thinking with the Poem document Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s authorial interventions as a poet, scholar, and cultural critic steeped in the linguistic and political frames of her time. The writers included in this volume engage root-level questions at the heart of DuPlessis’s praxis as posed by her in a recent essay: “What is a poem, what is a poet, what is an oeuvre, what is the ‘poetic’?” Inventive and noncanonical, these essays offer substantive responses to these and other questions, providing new routes of inquiry into the poetry and poetics of this preeminent figure of new writing.

Reginald Gibbons collects here a lifetime s worth of thoughts on composing and translating poetry. Not a manifesto or a general theory of the lyric, rather, the book explores how a poem thinks: that is, what results from the circumstances of a poet s native language, choice of words and topics, the mentality that the poet shares with other writers, and the range of poetic possibilities (and limitations) in a given language. Through exemplary case studies taken from his own experience in writing poetry, as well as in translating poetry from languages ranging from Sophocles s and Pindar s ancient Greek to their contemporary French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish successors, Gibbons traces the curious persistence of classical modes and images into the twenty-first century. He shows how the very language used in composing a poem, be it ancient Greek, Renaissance English, or contemporary Russian, both limits and enables how a poet thinks and what the poet can say. Even in describing difficult poetic concepts and operations, Gibbons writes in a clear, companionable style, entirely accessible not just to practicing poets, but also to general readers interested in poetry, and to writers of various stripes interested in the way our native language can often circumscribe what and how we think poetically, and affect how we compose poetry and prose. This book joins other titles by this award-winning writer on the Press s list."

Hearing Things is a meditation on sound’s work in literature. Drawing on critical works and the commentaries of many poets and novelists who have paid close attention to the role of the ear in writing and reading, Angela Leighton offers a reconsideration of literature itself as an exercise in hearing. An established critic and poet, Leighton explains how we listen to the printed word, while showing how writers use the expressivity of sound on the silent page. Although her focus is largely on poets—Alfred Tennyson, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham, and Alice Oswald—Leighton’s scope includes novels, letters, and philosophical writings as well. Her argument is grounded in the specificity of the text under discussion, but one important message emerges from the whole: literature by its very nature commands listening, and listening is a form of understanding that has often been overlooked. Hearing Things offers a renewed call for the kind of criticism that, avoiding the programmatic or purely ideological, remains alert to the work of sound in every literary text.

This book argues that poetry is compatible with systematic knowledge including science, and indeed inherent in it; it also discusses particular poems that engage with such knowledge, including those of Lucretius, Vergil, and Vita Sackville-West. The book argues that there are substantial similarities between knowledge-making and poetry-making, for example in their being shaped by language, including metaphor, and in their seeking unity in the world, under the impulse of eros and pleasure. The book also discusses some of the obstacles to a ‘poetry of knowledge’, including scientific objectivism, the Kantian tradition in philosophy, and the separation of the ‘two cultures’ in our academic and intellectual institutions. The book is designed to be accessible to all those interested in the issue of the ‘two cultures’, or in the role of poetry and of science in contemporary culture.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry contains thirty-eight original essays written by leading Shakespeareans around the world. Collectively, these essays seek to return readers to a revivified understanding of Shakespeare's verbal artistry in both the poems and the drama. The volume understands poetry to be not just a formal category designating a particular literary genre but to be inclusive of the dramatic verse as well, and of Shakespeare's influence as a poet on later generations of writers in English and beyond. Focusing on a broad set of interpretive concerns, the volume tackles general matters of Shakespeare's style, earlier and later; questions of influence from classical, continental, and native sources; the importance of words, line, and rhyme to meaning; the significance of songs and ballads in the drama; the place of gender in the verse, including the relationship of Shakespeare's poetry to the visual arts; the different values attached to speaking 'Shakespeare' in the theatre; and the adaptation of Shakespearean verse (as distinct from performance) into other periods and languages. The largest section, with ten essays, is devoted to the poems themselves: the Sonnets, plus 'A Lover's Complaint', the narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and 'The Phoenix and the Turtle'. If the volume as a whole urges a renewed involvement in the complex matter of Shakespeare's poetry, it does so, as the individual essays testify, by way of responding to critical trends and discoveries made during the last three decades.

Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s book takes its title from a telling anecdote. A few years ago Harpham met a Cuban immigrant on a college campus, who told of arriving, penniless and undocumented, in the 1960s and eventually earning a GED and making his way to a community college. In a literature course one day, the professor asked him, “Mr. Ramirez, what do you think?” The question, said Ramirez, changed his life because “it was the first time anyone had asked me that.” Realizing that his opinion had value set him on a course that led to his becoming a distinguished professor. That, says Harpham, was the midcentury promise of American education, the deep current of commitment and aspiration that undergirded the educational system that was built in the postwar years, and is under extended assault today. The United States was founded, he argues, on the idea that interpreting its foundational documents was the highest calling of opinion, and for a brief moment at midcentury, the country turned to English teachers as the people best positioned to train students to thrive as interpreters—which is to say as citizens of a democracy. Tracing the roots of that belief in the humanities through American history, Harpham builds a strong case that, even in very different contemporary circumstances, the emphasis on social and cultural knowledge that animated the midcentury university is a resource that we can, and should, draw on today.