"In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another--and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry...

"In Broken Ground, William Logan explores the works of canonical and contemporary poets, rediscovering the lushness of imagination and depth of feeling that distinguish poetry as a literary art. The book includes long essays on Emily Dickinson's envelopes, Ezra Pound's wrestling with Chinese, Robert Frost's letters, Philip Larkin's train station, and Mrs. Custer's volume of Tennyson, each teasing out the depths beneath the surface of the page. Broken...

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work--over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world's greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago...

This volume presents an exploration of poetry and feeling, introducing poems selected by the author as emblematic because they suggest something crucial about the nature of poetry itself, and offering his insights on how the poems should be read. In this guide, the author reaches out to all those who may be disaffected by the mere mention of poetry and instructs the reader to focus on a personal, emotional response.

John Hollander, poet and scholar, was a master whose work joined luminous learning and imaginative risk. This book, based on the unpublished Clark Lectures Hollander delivered in 1999 at Cambridge University, witnesses his power to shift the horizons of our thinking, as he traces the history of shadow in British and American poetry from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century. Shadow shows itself here in myriad literary identities, revealing...

Coming Soon...

Mutlu Konuk Blasing is Professor of English at Brown University. She is the author of The Art of Life, American Poetry, and Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry. Lyric poetry has long been regarded as the intensely private, emotional expression of individuals, powerful precisely because it draws readers into personal worlds. But who, exactly, is the "I" in a lyric poem, and how is it created? In Lyric Poetry, Mutlu Blasing argues that the individual...

"American Poetry: A Very Short Introduction proposes a new theory of American poetry. Written in engaging language and enlivened with illuminating examples, it shows that two characteristics mark the vast, contentious literature. On the one hand, several of its major poets and critics claim that America needs a poetry equal to the country's own distinctiveness. On the other hand, American poetry welcomes techniques, styles, and traditions that originate...

Ambiguity involves "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of langauge." The authors discusses seven classifications of differing complexity and depth of well-known literary works

"As Vidyan Ravinthiran sees it, the way poetry is written about falls into approaches either defined by academic scholarship or by literary journalism. The former too often distances the reader from the poem and the critic's personality is expunged. In literary journalism, the critic is front-and-center, but discussions of the poems and poets are introductory and often risk-averse in their approach. In both spheres, entrenched practices and positions...