A Little History of Poetry

A Little History of Poetry PDF Author: John Carey
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300252528
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature The Times and Sunday Times, Best Books of 2020 “[A] fizzing, exhilarating book.”—Sebastian Faulks, Sunday Times What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work—over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. But this Little History is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem “great” in the first place. For readers both young and old, this little history shines a light for readers on the richness of the world’s poems—and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.

A Little History of Poetry

A Little History of Poetry PDF Author: John Carey
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300252528
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature The Times and Sunday Times, Best Books of 2020 “[A] fizzing, exhilarating book.”—Sebastian Faulks, Sunday Times What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work—over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. But this Little History is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem “great” in the first place. For readers both young and old, this little history shines a light for readers on the richness of the world’s poems—and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.

Poems Containing History

Poems Containing History PDF Author: Gary Grieve-Carlson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781498550451
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This book argues that twentieth-century American poetry has "contained" and helped its readers to think about history in a variety of provocative and powerful ways. This book shows that even as history evolves into a professional discipline in the late nineteenth century, twentieth-century American poets continue to take history as the subject of their poems.

Poems Containing History

Poems Containing History PDF Author: Gary Grieve-Carlson
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739167561
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Ezra Pound’s definition of an epic as “a poem containing history” raises questions: how can a poem “contain” history? And if it can, does it help us to think about history in ways that conventional historiography cannot? Poems Containing History: Twentieth-Century American Poetry’s Engagement with the Past, by Gary Grieve-Carlson, argues that twentieth-century American poetry has “contained” and helped its readers to think about history in a variety of provocative and powerful ways. Tracing the discussion of the relationship between poetry and history from Aristotle’s Poetics to Norman Mailer’s The Armiesof the Night and Hayden White’s Metahistory, the book shows that even as history evolves into a professional, academic discipline in the late nineteenth century, and as its practitioners emphasize the scientific aspects of their work and minimize its literary aspects, twentieth-century American poets continue to take history as the subject of their major poems. Sometimes they endorse the views of mainstream historians, as Stephen Vincent Benét does in John Brown’s Body, but more often they challenge them, as do Robert Penn Warren in Brother to Dragons, Ezra Pound in TheCantos, or Charles Olson in TheMaximus Poems. In Conquistador, Archibald MacLeish illustrates Aristotle’s claim that poetry tells more philosophical truths about the past than history does, while in Paterson, William Carlos Williams develops a Nietzschean suspicion of history’s value. Three major American poets—T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets, Hart Crane in TheBridge, and Carolyn Forché in The Angel of History—present different challenges to professional historiography’s assumption that the past is best understood in strictly material terms. Poems Containing History devotes chapters to each of these poets and offers a clear sense of the seriousness with which American poetry has engaged the past, as well as the great variety of those engagements.

Hour of Freedom

Hour of Freedom PDF Author:
Publisher: Wordsong
ISBN: 9781590780213
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A collection of poems providing a look at the United States, from colonial times to the present.

Plume

Plume PDF Author: Kathleen Flenniken
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295805897
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 81

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Book Description
The poems in Plume are nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience set in the "empty" desert West. Award-winning poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland, Washington, at the height of the Cold War, next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where "every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb," and worked at Hanford herself as a civil engineer and hydrologist. By the late 1980s, declassified documents revealed decades of environmental contamination and deception at the plutonium production facility, contradicting a lifetime of official assurances to workers and their families that their community was and always had been safe. At the same time, her childhood friend Carolyn's own father was dying of radiation-induced illness: "blood cells began to err one moment efficient the next / a few gone wrong stunned by exposure to radiation / as [he] milled uranium into slugs or swabbed down / train cars or reported to B Reactor for a quick run-in / run-out." Plume, written twenty years later, traces this American betrayal and explores the human capacity to hold truth at bay when it threatens one's fundamental identity. Flenniken observes her own resistance to facts: "one box contains my childhood / the other contains his death / if one is true / how can the other be true?" The book's personal story and its historical one converge with enriching interplay and wide technical variety, introducing characters that range from Carolyn and her father to Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and Manhattan Project health physicist Herbert Parker. As a child of "Atomic City," Kathleen Flenniken brings to this tragedy the knowing perspective of an insider coupled with the art of a precise, unflinching, gifted poet. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iSaR9mfeeM

American History Poems

American History Poems PDF Author: Bobbi Katz
Publisher: Scholastic
ISBN: 9780590499736
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 72

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Book Description
Contains 30 original poems plus background information, writing prompts, and activities

A Poem Containing History

A Poem Containing History PDF Author: Lawrence S. Rainey
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472102327
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
A suggestive survey of new approaches to a twentieth-century classic

Jewish American Poetry

Jewish American Poetry PDF Author: Jonathan N. Barron
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584650430
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
A rich and provocative overview of Jewish American poetry.

The Cambridge History of English Poetry

The Cambridge History of English Poetry PDF Author: Michael O'Neill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521883067
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1117

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Book Description
A literary-historical account of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon writings to the present.

Lives

Lives PDF Author: Lee Bennett Hopkins
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006027767X
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 42

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Book Description
Poetry that makes us appreciate the magnitude of lives filled with courage, enthusiasm, inspiration. Lives: Poems About Famous Americans is the ideal introduction to sixteen American personalities who have changed the course of history. Favorite anthologist Lee Bennett Hopkins has brought together the work of a number of accomplished writers and poets, among them Jane Yolen, Nikki Grimes, and X. J. Kennedy, to portray such figures as Sacagawea, Babe Ruth, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Leslie Staubs portraits contain a poetry of their own, capturing a bit of history in the glint of smile or the reach of a hand. Lives is a book for all readers to savor. Notable Children's Trade Books in the Field of Social Studies 2000, National Council for SS & Child. Book Council