Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary PoetryHeresy and the Ideal is a powerful collection of essays and essay-reviews which David Baker wrote and published throughout the 1990s. He thoroughly discusses the work of more than fifty contemporary poets, including T. R. Hummer, Miller Williams, Albert Goldbarth, Jane Kenyon, Galway Kinnell, Charles Simic, Ted Kooser, David Wojahn, Alice Fulton, Louise Glück, and Charles Wright. He takes as his models some of the great critical books of the past three decades, especially Richard Howard's masterpiece, Alone with America, and Helen Vendler's Part of Nature, Part of Us, as well as other works by Laurence Lieberman, Majorie Perloff, Carol Muske, and Mary Kinzie. At its center, Heresy and the Ideal is based on Baker's sense of Romantic poetics, especially on how contemporary poets have applied, altered, or rejected certain Romantic principles. He uses the Romantic trope to measure the tension between passion and reason and between the problems of literary transcendence and the obligations of social engagement. The result is a welcome variety of enlightening, practical criticism devoid of exclusionary jargon and based on persistent attention to an individual poem or book of poems. Utilizing the essay-review, Baker considers each poet's purposes and achievements. He blends the strategies of explanation, analysis, and evaluation, clarifying each poet's work instead of complaining or condemning. Heresy and the Ideal addresses a wide and diverse range of contemporary poetry and should take a deserved place both as a critical introduction to the work of many important poets and as a work that documents and explores the shape of poetry at the end of the millennium. |
From inside the book
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Page xvi
... continue to mean ? These questions should be central to every poet and reader of poetry . They are also in my mind as I prepare to usher into the world a book about contemporary poetry . Who may read this book , and why ? Where will ...
... continue to mean ? These questions should be central to every poet and reader of poetry . They are also in my mind as I prepare to usher into the world a book about contemporary poetry . Who may read this book , and why ? Where will ...
Page xvii
... continue to sing , lament , think , and praise , as they have for millennia . If university English professors are busy theorizing about literature , many of their students seem more compelled to try to write it . After World War II the ...
... continue to sing , lament , think , and praise , as they have for millennia . If university English professors are busy theorizing about literature , many of their students seem more compelled to try to write it . After World War II the ...
Page 16
... continues beyond my quotation ; the whole , halting move- ment is punctuated frequently , as by quick breaths ; the lines are enjambed to enhance the sense of hanging , suspension between one life and another . The various incidents ...
... continues beyond my quotation ; the whole , halting move- ment is punctuated frequently , as by quick breaths ; the lines are enjambed to enhance the sense of hanging , suspension between one life and another . The various incidents ...
Page 19
... continue his climb — even as the rhyming pattern , once started , must go on . He hears a sad love song playing in a car below , " some poor fool in love / With someone gone , " and realizes the inevitable fate of his passion : " he'll ...
... continue his climb — even as the rhyming pattern , once started , must go on . He hears a sad love song playing in a car below , " some poor fool in love / With someone gone , " and realizes the inevitable fate of his passion : " he'll ...
Page 37
... continues to oversee . After all , the Romantic text main- tains within itself , through the laws of its governing body , not only the means but the imperative for its own confrontation . 37 To Advantage Dressed : Miller Williams among ...
... continues to oversee . After all , the Romantic text main- tains within itself , through the laws of its governing body , not only the means but the imperative for its own confrontation . 37 To Advantage Dressed : Miller Williams among ...
Contents
3 | |
On Albert Goldbarth Jane Kenyon LiYoung Lee | 61 |
The Push of Reading | 79 |
Framed in Words | 99 |
Smarts | 119 |
On Eric Pankey Louise Glück Linda Bierds | 137 |
Plainness and Sufficiency | 149 |
Line by Line | 169 |
On Restraint | 205 |
Romantic Melancholy Romantic Excess | 221 |
StillHildreth Sanatorium 1936 | 277 |
INDEX | 287 |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic Albert Goldbarth Alice Fulton American Angelic Orders articulate becomes body Boland book of poems book's Charles Simic clarity connection contemporary poetry Coulette critical cultural David Wojahn dead death deep image desire Diane di Prima dramatic Eavan Boland erasure erotic experience Falling Hour figure final formal Glück Goldbarth grace Hell Henri Coulette Heresy Hummer's Ideal imagery imagination impulse Jane Kenyon Jorie Graham kind Kinnell Kooser language lines literary lives loss Louise Glück lover lyric MacNeice means memory Merwin's method Miller Williams mother mystery Naked poets narrative nature night Olds's Pankey passion past poem's poet's poetic political provides rhetorical rhyme Romantic Romanticism seems sense social song sonnet speaker spiritual stance stanzas story strategy syntax T. R. Hummer technique things tion transcendence transcendental trope turns vision voice Whitman Williams's Wojahn woman words Wright writes