Against coercion games poets play
This book looks at how poems work, showing how they speak to historical, ethical, and aesthetic questions. It also demonstrates how to read poetry—how to go beyond an elementary approach, to recover the sheer pleasure of good poems.
Print Book, English, 1998
Orig. print View all formats and editions
Stanford Univ. Press, Stanford, Calif, 1998
XIV, 318 S.
9780804729376, 0804729379
1068498284
Foreword; Introduction; Part I. Empire, War, Nation: 1. Eliot, Keynes, and Empire: The Waste Land; 2. Schemes against coercion: Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Bishop, and others; 3. Fables of war in Elizabeth Bishop; 4. Faulkner, typology and black history in Go Down, Moses; 5. A seeing and unseeing in the eye: Canadian literature and the sense of place; Part II. Culture and the Uses of memory: Allusion: 6. Questions of allusion; 7. The language of scripture in Wordsworth's Prelude; 8. The senses of Eliot's salvages; 9. Wallace Stevens and the King James bible; 10. Birds in paradise: revisions of a topos in Milton, Keats, Whitman, Stevens, and Ammons; Part III. Poetry at Play: 11. Melos versus logos, or, why doesn't God sing? Some thoughts on Milton's wisdom; 12. The poetics of modern punning; Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and others; 13. Riddles, charms, and fictions in Wallace Stevens; 14. The function of riddles at the present time; 15. The flying griphos: in pursuit of enigma from Aristophanes to Tournesol, with stops in Carroll, Ariosto, and Dante; Part IV. Practice: 16. Ghost rhymes and how they work; 17. Methought as dream formula in Shakespeare; Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, and others; 18. Reading a poem: on John Hollander's 'owl' 19. Teaching poetry: accurate songs, or thinking-in-poetry; Appendix; Notes; Indices; Acknowledgments.