Classic writings on poetry / edited by William Harmon.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Harmon, William, 1938-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poetics.

Poetry--History and criticism.

Poetry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 538 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, c2003.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre.-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "The Poet"[The poet] is a seer.... he is individual... he is complete in himself.... the others are as good as he, only he sees it and they do not. He is not one of the chorus. "-Walt Whitman, from the preface to Leaves of Grass Poetry has always given rise to interpretation, judgment, and controversy. Indeed, the history of poetry criticism is as rich and varied a journey as the history of poetry itself. But classic writings such as Emerson's essay "The Poet" and Whitman's preface to Leaves of Grass serve as more than a critical "call and response": the works are striking examples of how the finest poets themselves have written on poetics and the works of their peers and predecessors-revealing, in the process, much about the theory and passion behind their own works. Spanning thousands of years and including thirty-three of the most influential critical essays ever written, Classic Writings on Poetry is the first major anthology of criticism devoted exclusively to poetry. Beginning with a survey of the history of poetics and providing an introduction and brief biography for each reading, esteemed poet and critic William Harmon takes readers from Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Poetics to the Norse mythology of Snorri Sturluson's Skáldskaparmál. John Dryden's An Essay of Dramatic Poesy and Shelley's A Defence of Poetry are included, as is an excerpt from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse novel Aurora Leigh, arriving, finally, at the modernist sensibility of "Poetic Reality and Critical Unreality," by Laura (Riding) Jackson. For anyone interested in the art and artifice of poetry, Classic Writings on Poetry is a journey well worth taking.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Introduction

1. Plato

2. Aristotle

3. Horace

4. Publius Cornelius Tacitus

5. Longinus(?)

6. Snorri Sturluson

7. Sir Philip Sidney

8. John Milton

9. John Dryden

10. Alexander Pope

11. Samuel Johnson

12. Thomas Gray

13. William Wordsworth

14. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

15. Francis Jeffrey

16. William Hazlitt

17. Thomas Love Peacock

18. George Gordon, Lord Byron

19. Percy Bysshe Shelley

20. William Cullen Bryant

21. John Keats

22. Ralph Waldo Emerson

23. Elizabeth Barrett Browning

24. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

25. Edgar Allan Poe

26. Walt Whitman

27. Matthew Arnold

28. Emily Dickinson

29. Rudyard Kipling

30. Ezra Pound

31. T. S. Eliot

32. Laura (Riding) Jackson

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9780231503228

0231503229

OCLC:

828303874