The offense of poetry / Hazard Adams.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Adams, Hazard, 1926-2023.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poetry.

Poetry--History and criticism.

Physical Description:

xi, 271 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2007]

Summary:

There is something offensive and scandalous about poetry, judging by the number of attacks on it and defenses of it written over the centuries. Poetry, Hazard Adams argues, exists to offend-not through its subject matter but through the challenges it presents to the prevailing view of what language is for.

Poetry achieves its cultural value by opposing the binary oppositions-form and content, fact and fiction, reason and emotion-that structure and polarize most understandings of literature and of life. Adams takes a position antithetical to the extremes of both abstract formalism and the politicization of literary content. He concludes with an appreciation of what he calls the double offense of "great bad poetry," poetry so exceptionally bad that it transcends its shortcomings and leads to gaiety.

Contents:

1 Introduction: Scandal and Offense 3

Part I Historical: Attack and Defense

2 Attack 29

3 Defense 63

Part II Theoretical: Four Offenses

4 Gesture 95

5 Drama 113

6 Fiction 129

7 Trope 141

Part III Critical: Studies in Antithetical Offense

8 Vico and Blake: Poetic Logic as Offense 161

9 Blake and Joyce: Friends in Offense 179

10 Joyce Cary's Antitheticality and His Politics of Experience 193

11 Seamus Heaney's Criticism and the Antithetical 215

12 The Double Offense of Great Bad Poetry; or, McGonagall Apotheosized 233

Epilogue: Reminders Not Quite Gentle 261.

Notes:

"A Robert B. Heilman book."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780295987422

0295987421

9780295987590

0295987596

OCLC:

145732815