The power of less : essays on poetry and public speech / Samuel Hazo.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hazo, Samuel, 1928-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poetry.

Public speaking.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (113 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Milwaukee, Wis. : Marquette University Press, c2005.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The greatest poets in history have endured because their expressed visions have helped us see and feel those things that are permanently true of the human condition. In our era when so much of what passes for poetry is really sociology, ideology, rhetoric or mere wordplay, it is well to be reminded of the fact that great poetry is more than that. Whether it inspires insight or wonder, visionary poetry is more than a different use of language. It is another language--a language that always manages to outlive its authors, its circumstances and the time of its creation. Poems come into existence out of absolute and unavoidable and largely inexplicable necessity. They are ongoing presences, and ongoing presences have no past tense because they always exist in the now. In this sense, Ezra Pound noted, all literature--if it is literature at all--is contemporary. "Each of the essays in this book deals with some aspect of poetry's visionary nature--its awe-inspiring impact; its reliance upon feeling as being more dependable a form of knowledge than the conclusions of science or discursive reason; its capacity to convey the mysterious so that the final result is not mere pleasure but wisdom; its essential difference from mere verse; its challenge to translators who struggle to re-create in one language what is poetically present in another; its capability of inspiring poets to spring the locks of falsifying or stultifying forms of expression in order to say what they feel and see as they actually felt and saw it."

Contents:

The Power of Less

Samuel HazoThe Power of Less: Essays on Poetry and Public Speech

© 2005 Marquette University Press

Acknowledgements

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

"And take upon us the mystery of things As if we were God's spies."-William Shakespeare King Lear V, iii

1 TO UGLIFY OR BEAUTIFY

2 FEAR OF FEELING

3 Political Correctness versus Poetry

4 Whatness versus Muchness

5 Standpoint Eliot's

Outlook Mine

6 The Poetry of Anemia

7 So True as to Be Invisible

8 One Definite Mozart

About the Author.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

ISBN:

0-87462-986-1

1-4237-3355-X

OCLC:

62267966