"In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another--and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry...

"We live in unsettled times. What is America and who are we as a people? How do we understand the dreams and betrayals that have shaped the American experience? For poet and critic Edward Hirsch, poetry opens up new ways of answering these questions, of reconnecting with one another and with what's best in us. In this landmark new book from Library of America, Hirsch offers deeply personal readings of forty essential American poems we thought we knew--from...

"This book attempts to provide a context for a poetics of resistance and refuge that predates the Trump Age and will be necessary long after it. In order to survive such moments, we need to glean the present and past for what might sustain us for the work ahead. The Sound of Listening gathers ten years of essays on poetry and builds on Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront, since 1941 (2007), staking a claim for the cultural...

With his customary wit, delightfully lucid prose style and wide-ranging knowledge, Clive James explains the difference between the innocuous stuff so prevalent today and a real poem: the latter being a work of unity that insists on being heard entire and threatens never to leave the memory. A committed formalist and an astute commentator, James examines the poems and legacies of a panorama of twentieth-century poets, from Hart Crane to Ezra Pound,...

Exploring the ways in which how we write about poetry - the language, forms and styles of criticism - lies at the heart of our critical engagement with poetry, The Winnowing Fan presents a series of reflections that adopt the forms of poetry to write about poetry. Traversing a wide spectrum of poetic history, from Homer's Odyssey, through the work of French symbolists such as Mallarme to modern writers such as W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney, Christopher...

A comprehensive reference work dealing with all aspects of its subject: history, types, movements, prosody, and critical terminology. This edition, completely revised, preserves what was most valuable from previous editions while subjecting each existing entry to revision. Over 90% of the entries have been extensively revised and most major ones entirely rewritten. New entries include those on cultural criticism, discourse, feminist poetics, and Chicano...

Using works by poets ranging from Antonio Machado and Pablo Neruda to Galway Kinnell and Franz Kafka, Roger Housden presents each poem as a catalyst, then creates a text upon which the reader is invited to reflect more deeply.

"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,...

"A playful and punny illustrated poetry collection from Brian Cleary that's perfect for middle grade readers. Includes quick tips about poetic forms and poetic devices that teachers can use in poetry lessons"--