Melodious guile : fictive pattern in poetic language / John Hollander.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hollander, John.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English poetry--History and criticism.

English poetry.

English language--Versification.

English language.

Poetics.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

x, 262 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, [1988]

Summary:

Demonstrating a poet's imaginative ear and a critic's range of concern, John Hollander here writes about the "melodious guile" of poetry, explaining how poems frame parables about themselves. Hollander considers works by Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, chiefly, plus a range of other poets including Chaucer, Keats, Rossetti, Tennyson, Frost, Stevens, and Auden. He also presents certain poems of his own, showing how they anticipate and exemplify the observations contained in this volume.

Hollander discusses different levels of patterning in verse, examining how such rhetorical schemes as rhyme, word order, and stanza form not only support and display figures of speech, but often themselves become the strongest and most moving of metaphors. He explains that devices such as rhetorical questions and imperatives, inversions, egregiously long lines, and sonnet pattern and refrain all exist in poetry to tell stories about the way the poems operate. He also focuses on larger issues in poetics in terms of their figurative use: concepts such as "character" and "occasion" and, finally, the ways in which the differences between example and metaphor point up the contrasts between philosophers' and poets' stances toward their own language. Throughout, because of his view that poetry does indeed represent the world of which it is part, Hollander implicitly opposes certain positions taken both by recent literary theory and its self-designated "humanist" antagonists.

Contents:

1. Turnings and Fashionings 1

2. Questions of Poetry 18

3. Poetic Answers 41

4. Poetic Imperatives 64

5. Garlands of Her Own: Bondage, Work, and Freedom 85

6. Necessary Hieroglyphs 111

7. Breaking into Song: Some Notes on Refrain 130

8. Spenser's Undersong 148

9. The Footing of His Feet: A Long Line Leads to Another 164

10. Dallying Nicely with Words: Poetic Linguistics 180

11. The Poetics of Character 194

12. The Philosopher's Cat: Examples and Fictions 207.

Notes:

"Some of these essays originally appeared, often in different form, in other places"--Pref.

Includes index.

Bibliography: pages 241-255.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy has dustjacket retained.

ISBN:

0300042930

OCLC:

17805901