by Robin Blaser (2006)
"Spanning four decades of meditation on the avant-garde in poetry, art, and philosophy, the essays collected in The Fire reveal Robin Blaser's strikingly fresh perspective on "New American" poets, deconstructive philosophies, current events, and the state of humanities now. His response to the cultural and political events of his time has been to construct a poetic voice that offers a singular perspective on a shareable world - and to pose that voice alongside others as a source of countermemory and potential agency. Conceived as conversations, these essays brilliantly reflect that ethos as they re-read the cultural events of the past fifty years."--Publisher description.
Jahan Ramazani
Poetry is often regarded as being 'stubbornly national', with little influence outwith the country in which it is written. In this book however, the author reveals many ways in which modern and contemporary poetry in English overflows national borders and exceeds the scope of national literary pardigms.
Lawrence S. Rainey
A Poem Containing History offers nine essays that examine Pound's major poem from a historical and contextual perspective, in which the work's textual development is brought to center stage. The result is a significant reconsideration not just a Pound's achievement, but of modernist poetics and its relations with history. The contributors, all major scholars, examine The Cantos from their beginnings in the late 1910s to their inconclusive ending with Pound's death in 1972. Together the essays reconstruct the many contexts in which Pound lived and wrote, and how these affected the evolution of his most important work. Several essays offer comprehensive surveys of the text's publication history, while most examine the development of particular groups of cantos that were produced in succeeding decades. Repeatedly the essays show that Pound's poem was an unstable work in process, one that readily accommodated input from a variety of agents other than Pound himself, and one that may ultimately have escaped his control altogether.
Willard Spiegelman
"Willard Spiegelman is considered one of the finest critics of poetry writing today. This volume collects his best work on the subject, offering essays that span his entire career and chart his changing relationship to an elusive form. With his trademark perfect pitch, in engaging and stylish prose, Spiegelman takes readers on a tour of the diverse landscape of British, American, and Latin poetry, as he provides nuanced, insightful readings of works by our greatest poets." "Ultimately, Imaginative Transcripts is less a survey of a field than a reflection of one man's literary interests and tastes. It is also an impassioned argument in favor of keeping the close reading of poetry, both in and out of the classroom, at the heart of a literary education."--Jacket.
Anne Holmes
"This is the first work in English to devote itself entirely to the poetry of Jules Laforgue (1860-1887). Based on a detailed study of manuscripts as well as printed texts, it analyses the evolution of Laforgue's poetic ideas as he understood it himself." "Anne Holmes presents a detailed investigation of Laforgue's changing poetic techniques in order to illuminate both his extraordinary poetic versatility and the significance of his adoption of free verse. Arguing that Laforgue is the great innovator in the use of free verse in French poetry, Holmes sheds light on his method of composition by means of close analysis of variants, and explores the precise nature of his experiment with interior monologue. She sets Laforgue firmly in the context of contemporary French poetry and highlights the influence on him of Walt Whitman and Impressionist painting. Comparison is also made with the work of T. S. Eliot, for whom Laforgue was a major influence." "Laforgue emerges from this study as a far more important figure in the evolution of French verse than has previously been thought. He stands as a great and self-consciously modern writer, close in spirit to his twentieth-century successors."--BOOK JACKET.