The Art of Reading Poetry

The Art of Reading Poetry PDF

Author: Harold Bloom

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2005-03-01

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 0060769661

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A paperback original, Bloom's stand–alone introduction to The Best Poems of the English Language. A notable feature of Harold Bloom's poetry anthology The Best Poems English Language is his lengthy introductory essay, here reprinted as a separate book. For the first time Bloom gives his readers an elegant guide to reading poetry––a master critic's distillation of a lifetime of teaching and criticism. He tackles such subjects as poetic voice, the nature of metaphor and allusion, and the nature of poetic value itself. Bloom writes "the work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists of ourselves." This essay is an invaluable guide to poetry. This edition will also include a recommended reading list of poems.

The Art of Poetry

The Art of Poetry PDF

Author: Shira Wolosky

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-09-19

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0190451629

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In The Art of Poetry, Shira Wolosky provides a dazzling introduction to an art whose emphasis on verbal music, wordplay, and dodging the merely literal makes it at once the most beguiling and most challenging of literary forms. A uniquely comprehensive, step-by-step introduction to poetic form, The Art of Poetry moves progressively from smaller units such as the word, line, and image, to larger features such as verse forms and voice. In fourteen engaging, beautifully written chapters, Wolosky explores in depth how poetry does what it does while offering brilliant readings of some of the finest lyric poetry in the English and American traditions. Both readers new to poetry and poetry veterans will be moved and enlightened as Wolosky interprets work by William Shakespeare, John Donne, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, and others. The book includes a superb two-chapter discussion of the sonnet's form and history, and represents the first poetry guide to introduce gender as a basic element of analysis. In contrast to many existing guides, which focus on selected formal aspects like metrics or present definitions and examples in a handbook format, The Art of Poetry covers the full landscape of poetry's subtle art while showing readers how to comprehend a poetic text in all its dimensions. Other special features include Wolosky's consideration of historical background for the developments she discusses, and the way her book is designed to acquaint or reacquaint readers with the core of the lyric tradition in English. Lively, accessible, and original, The Art of Poetry will be a rich source of inspiration for students, general readers, and those who teach poetry.

How to Read Poetry Like a Professor

How to Read Poetry Like a Professor PDF

Author: Thomas C. Foster

Publisher: HarperLuxe

Published: 2018-03-27

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780062791870

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From the bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor comes this essential primer to reading poetry like a professor that unlocks the keys to enjoying works from Lord Byron to the Beatles. No literary form is as admired and feared as poetry. Admired for its lengthy pedigree—a line of poets extending back to a time before recorded history—and a ubiquitous presence in virtually all cultures, poetry is also revered for its great beauty and the powerful emotions it evokes. But the form has also instilled trepidation in its many admirers mainly because of a lack of familiarity and knowledge. Poetry demands more from readers—intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually—than other literary forms. Most of us started out loving poetry because it filled our beloved children's books from Dr. Seuss to Robert Louis Stevenson. Eventually, our reading shifted to prose and later when we encountered poetry again, we had no recent experience to make it feel familiar. But reading poetry doesn’t need to be so overwhelming. In an entertaining and engaging voice, Thomas C. Foster shows readers how to overcome their fear of poetry and learn to enjoy it once more. From classic poets such as Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to later poets such as E.E. Cummings, Billy Collins, and Seamus Heaney, How to Read Poetry Like a Professor examines a wide array of poems and teaches readers: How to read a poem to understand its primary meaning. The different technical elements of poetry such as meter, diction, rhyme, line structures, length, order, regularity, and how to learn to see these elements as allies rather than adversaries. How to listen for a poem’s secondary meaning by paying attention to the echoes that the language of poetry summons up. How to hear the music in poems—and the poetry in songs! With How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, readers can rediscover poetry and reap its many rewards.

Don't Read Poetry

Don't Read Poetry PDF

Author: Stephanie Burt

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2019-05-21

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 0465094511

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An award-winning poet offers a brilliant introduction to the joys--and challenges--of the genre 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 of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish--and distinguish among--individual poems. A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike.

Reading Poetry

Reading Poetry PDF

Author: Tom Furniss

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-04-07

Total Pages: 666

ISBN-13: 1000548996

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Reading Poetry offers a comprehensive and accessible guide to the art of reading poetry. Discussing more than 200 poems by more than 100 writers, ranging from ancient Greece and China to the twenty-first century, the book introduces readers to the skills and the critical and theoretical awareness that enable them to read poetry with enjoyment and insight. This third edition has been significantly updated in response to current developments in poetry and poetic criticism, and includes many new examples and exercises, new chapters on ‘world poetry’ and ‘eco-poetry’, and a greater emphasis throughout on American poetry, including the impact traditional Chinese poetry has had on modern American poetry. The seventeen carefully staged chapters constitute a complete apprenticeship in reading poetry, leading readers from specific features of form and figurative language to larger concerns with genre, intertextuality, Caribbean poetry, world poetry, and the role poetry can play in response to the ecological crisis. The workshop exercises at the end of each chapter, together with an extensive glossary of poetic and critical terms, and the number and range of poems analysed and discussed – 122 of which are quoted in full – make Reading Poetry suitable for individual study or as a comprehensive, self-contained textbook for university and college classes.

Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism

Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism PDF

Author: Mark Royden Winchell

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 558

ISBN-13: 9780813916477

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During a career that spanned sixty years, Cleanth Brooks was involved in most of the major controversies facing the humanities from the 1930s until his death in 1994. He was arguably the most important American literary critic of the mid-twentieth century. Because it is impossible to understand modern literary criticism apart from Cleanth Brooks, or Cleanth Brooks apart from modern literary criticism, Mark Royden Winchell gives us not only an account of one man's influence but also a survey of literary criticism in twentieth-century America. More than any other individual, Brooks helped steer literary study away from historical and philological scholarship by emphasizing the autonomy of the text. He applied the methods of what came to be called the New Criticism, not only to the modernist works for which these methods were created, but to the entire canon of English poetry, from John Donne to William Butler Yeats. In his many critical books, especially The Well Wrought Urn and the textbooks he edited with Robert Penn Warren and others, Brooks taught several generations of students how to read literature without prejudice or preconception.