Poets Thinking

Poets Thinking PDF Author: Helen Vendler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674044622
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
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.

Poets Thinking

Poets Thinking PDF Author: Helen Vendler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674044622
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
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.

Poets Thinking

Poets Thinking PDF Author: Helen Vendler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674021105
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, yet Vendler argues that all poets of value are thinkers. The four poets taken up in this volume—Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, and Yeats—come from three centuries and three nations, and their styles of thinking are characteristically idiosyncratic.

The Hatred of Poetry

The Hatred of Poetry PDF Author: Ben Lerner
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0865478201
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 97

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Book Description
"The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance"--

Thinking Its Presence

Thinking Its Presence PDF Author: Dorothy J. Wang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804789096
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
When will American poetry and poetics stop viewing poetry by racialized persons as a secondary subject within the field? Dorothy J. Wang makes an impassioned case that now is the time. Thinking Its Presence calls for a radical rethinking of how American poetry is being read today, offering its own reading as a roadmap. While focusing on the work of five contemporary Asian American poets—Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, John Yau, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Pamela Lu—the book contends that aesthetic forms are inseparable from social, political, and historical contexts in the writing and reception of all poetry. Wang questions the tendency of critics and academics alike to occlude the role of race in their discussions of the American poetic tradition and casts a harsh light on the double standard they apply in reading poems by poets who are racial minorities. This is the first sustained study of the formal properties in Asian American poetry across a range of aesthetic styles, from traditional lyric to avant-garde. Wang argues with conviction that critics should read minority poetry with the same attention to language and form that they bring to their analyses of writing by white poets.

Thinking Poetry

Thinking Poetry PDF Author: Peter Nicholls
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134918143
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
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.

How Poems Think

How Poems Think PDF Author: Reginald Gibbons
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022627814X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
To write or read a poem is often to think in distinctively poetic ways—guided by metaphors, sound, rhythms, associative movement, and more. Poetry’s stance toward language creates a particular intelligence of thought and feeling, a compressed articulation that expands inner experience, imagining with words what cannot always be imagined without them. Through translation, poetry has diversified poetic traditions, and some of poetry’s ways of thinking begin in the ancient world and remain potent even now. In How Poems Think, Reginald Gibbons presents a rich gallery of poetic inventiveness and continuity drawn from a wide range of poets—Sappho, Pindar, Shakespeare, Keats, William Carlos Williams, Marina Tsvetaeva, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many others. Gibbons explores poetic temperament, rhyme, metonymy, etymology, and other elements of poetry as modes of thinking and feeling. In celebration and homage, Gibbons attunes us to the possibilities of poetic thinking.

How to Think Like a Poet

How to Think Like a Poet PDF Author: Dai George
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1399408283
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
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.

Poetry, Language, Thought

Poetry, Language, Thought PDF Author: Martin Heidegger
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060937289
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Essential reading for students and anyone interested in the great philosophers, this book opened up appreciation of Martin Heidegger beyond the confines of philosophy to the reaches of poetry. In Heidegger's thinking, poetry is not a mere amusement or form of culture but a force that opens up the realm of truth and brings man to the measure of his being and his world.

Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought

Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought PDF Author: Paul Magee
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 153815353X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Interrogating the much-cherished concept of “poetic thinking,” this book focuses on what interview and draft materials reveal of how poets actually do think, when in the act of writing. The interviews confirm what findings from cognitive science and linguistics make clear: we rarely know exactly what words we are going to say, until we have said them. Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought draws out the implications of a radically curtailed view of consciousness on how we understand the drafting and revision of lines of poetry, with implications for our theorisation of the composition of prose. Henrich von Kleist’s assertion that “it is not we, but a certain condition of ours which knows” emerges as central to this reassessment of the nature of the written word. Employing an extensive archive of interview materials with major Anglophone poets, discussing how they think in the moments of composition, this book also provides a lucid account of the links between poetic composition and live performative thinking in the contexts of Romantic compositional practice and the early (pre)textual history of ancient Greek epic. A transdisciplinary study at the crossroads of philosophy, cognitive psychology, literary studies, and linguistics, this book reconceptualizes the wellsprings of poetic thought and advances our understanding of thinking’s complex but vital link to improvised speech.

Dickinson

Dickinson PDF Author: Emily Dickinson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674048679
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the most attentive readers of poetry. Here, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems. In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson’s work as a poet, “from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath.” Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, Vendler’s selection reveals Emily Dickinson’s development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called “the history and science of feeling.” In accompanying commentaries Vendler offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, “the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes.” All of Dickinson’s preoccupations—death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought—are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet’s startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson as “a master” of a revolutionary verse-language of immediacy and power. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries will be an indispensable reference work for students of Dickinson and readers of lyric poetry.