A Poetry Handbook


Book Description

With passion, wit, and good common sense, the celebrated poet Mary Oliver tells of the basic ways a poem is built-meter and rhyme, form and diction, sound and sense. Drawing on poems from Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others, Oliver imparts an extraordinary amount of information in a remarkably short space. "Stunning" (Los Angeles Times). Index.




The Poetry Handbook


Book Description

The Poetry Handbook is a lucid and entertaining guide to the poet's craft, and an invaluable introduction to practical criticism for students. Chapters on each element of poetry, from metre to gender, offer a wide-ranging general account, and end by looking at two or three poems from a small group (including works by Donne, Elizabeth Bishop, Geoffrey Hill, and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott), to build up sustained analytical readings. Thorough and compact, with notes and quotations supplemented by detailed reference to the Norton Anthology of Poetry and a companion website with texts, links, and further discussion, The Poetry Handbook is indispensable for all school and undergraduate students of English. A final chapter addresses examinations of all kinds, and sample essays by undergraduates are posted on the website. Critical and scholarly terms are italicised and clearly explained, both in the text and in a complete glossary; the volume also includes suggestions for further reading. The first edition, widely praised by teachers and students, showed how the pleasures of poetry are heightened by rigorous understanding and made that understanding readily available. This second edition — revised, expanded, updated, and supported by a new companion website - confirm The Poetry Handbook as the best guide to poetry available in English.




Rules for the Dance


Book Description

For both readers and writers of poetry, here is a concise and engaging introduction to sound, rhyme, meter, and scansion - and why they matter. "The dance, " in the case of this brief and luminous book, refers to the interwoven pleasures of sound and sense to be found in some of the most celebrated and beautiful poems in the English language, from Shakespeare to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Robert Frost. With a poet's ear and a poet's grace of expression, Mary Oliver helps us understand what makes a metrical poem work - and enables readers, as only she can, to "enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure."




The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms


Book Description

A reference guide to various forms of poetry with entries arranged in alphabetical order. Each entry defines the form and gives its history, examples, and suggestions for usage.




The Sounds of Poetry


Book Description

The Poet Laureate's clear and entertaining account of how poetry works. "Poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art," Robert Pinsky declares in The Sounds of Poetry. "The medium of poetry is the human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is as physical or bodily an art as dancing." As Poet Laureate, Pinsky is one of America's best spokesmen for poetry. In this fascinating book, he explains how poets use the "technology" of poetry--its sounds--to create works of art that are "performed" in us when we read them aloud. He devotes brief, informative chapters to accent and duration, syntax and line, like and unlike sounds, blank and free verse. He cites examples from the work of fifty different poets--from Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert to W. C. Williams, Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, C. K. Williams, Louise Glück, and Frank Bidart. This ideal introductory volume belongs in the library of every poet and student of poetry.




The Book of Forms


Book Description

Companion to the Book of Literary Terms, an indispensable handbook, revised and updated for today's users.




A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now


Book Description

A monument to the literary genius of women throughout the ages, A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now is an invaluable collection. Here in one volume are the works of three hundred poets from six different continents and four millennia. This revised edition includes a newly expanded section of American poets from the colonial era to the present. "[A] splendid collection of verse by women" (TIME) throughout the ages and around the world; now revised and expanded, with 38 American poets.




The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms


Book Description

An essential handbook for literary studies The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms—drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics—provides an authoritative guide to the most important terms in the study of poetry and literature. Featuring 226 fully revised and updated entries, including 100 that are new to this edition, the book offers clear and insightful definitions and discussions of critical concepts, genres, forms, movements, and poetic elements, followed by invaluable, up-to-date bibliographies that guide users to further reading and research. Because the entries are carefully selected and adapted from the Princeton Encyclopedia, the Handbook has unrivalled breadth and depth for a book of its kind, in a convenient, portable size. Fully indexed for the first time and complete with an introduction by the editors, this is an essential volume for all literature students, teachers, and researchers, as well as other readers and writers. Drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics Provides 226 fully updated and authoritative entries, including 100 new to this edition, written by an international team of leading scholars Features entries on critical concepts (canon, mimesis, prosody, syntax); genres, forms, and movements (ballad, blank verse, confessional poetry, ode); and terms (apostrophe, hypotaxis and parataxis, meter, tone) Includes an introduction, bibliographies, cross-references, and a full index




A Little Book on Form


Book Description

An acute and deeply insightful book of essays exploring poetic form and the role of instinct and imagination within form—from former poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Robert Hass. Robert Hass—former poet laureate, winner of the National Book Award, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize—illuminates the formal impulses that underlie great poetry in this sophisticated, graceful, and accessible volume of essays drawn from a series of lectures he delivered at the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A Little Book on Form brilliantly synthesizes Hass’s formidable gifts as both a poet and a critic and reflects his profound education in the art of poetry. Starting with the exploration of a single line as the basic gesture of a poem, and moving into an examination of the essential expressive gestures that exist inside forms, Hass goes beyond approaching form as a set of traditional rules that precede composition, and instead offers penetrating insight into the true openness and instinctiveness of formal creation. A Little Book on Form is a rousing reexamination of our longest lasting mode of literature from one of our greatest living poets.




A Handbook to Eddic Poetry


Book Description

This is the first comprehensive and accessible survey in English of Old Norse eddic poetry: a remarkable body of literature rooted in the Viking Age, which is a critical source for the study of early Scandinavian myths, poetics, culture and society. Dramatically recreating the voices of the legendary past, eddic poems distil moments of high emotion as human heroes and supernatural beings alike grapple with betrayal, loyalty, mortality and love. These poems relate the most famous deeds of gods such as Óðinn and Þórr with their adversaries the giants; they bring to life the often fraught interactions between kings, queens and heroes as well as their encounters with valkyries, elves, dragons and dwarfs. Written by leading international scholars, the chapters in this volume showcase the poetic riches of the eddic corpus, and reveal its relevance to the history of poetics, gender studies, pre-Christian religions, art history and archaeology.