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
Results 1-5 of 54
Page xviii
... lyric and narrative and speculative poets , writers of every political and cultural cadre . I can imagine fifty entirely different , yet equally engaging , poets in another book like this ; that's how abundant our time is . By the term ...
... lyric and narrative and speculative poets , writers of every political and cultural cadre . I can imagine fifty entirely different , yet equally engaging , poets in another book like this ; that's how abundant our time is . By the term ...
Page xxi
... lyric poem is fundamentally Romantic , as much of America's social and political heritage is Romantic . But while a concern with Romantic poetics undergirds this book , I have not wanted to make everything comply to this set of precepts ...
... lyric poem is fundamentally Romantic , as much of America's social and political heritage is Romantic . But while a concern with Romantic poetics undergirds this book , I have not wanted to make everything comply to this set of precepts ...
Page xxii
... lyric itself may be a kind of thinking . I am interested in related issues of style and tactics , again , to deter ... lyrics ) , as between other related dichotomies , such as melancholy and excess , or restraint and abundance . It is ...
... lyric itself may be a kind of thinking . I am interested in related issues of style and tactics , again , to deter ... lyrics ) , as between other related dichotomies , such as melancholy and excess , or restraint and abundance . It is ...
Page 8
... lyrics of Hummer's apprentice work . " The Rural Carrier Discovers That Love Is Everywhere " is especially ten- der , a scene of lovemaking that resists interruption by the carrier's routine visit . The domestic setting of the poem also ...
... lyrics of Hummer's apprentice work . " The Rural Carrier Discovers That Love Is Everywhere " is especially ten- der , a scene of lovemaking that resists interruption by the carrier's routine visit . The domestic setting of the poem also ...
Page 17
... lyric voice and narrative gift with a poetic anxiety and strength that transcends— or subscends — the personal . The anxiety of historical inheritance provides the opening tension of The Passion of the Right - Angled Man . The first ...
... lyric voice and narrative gift with a poetic anxiety and strength that transcends— or subscends — the personal . The anxiety of historical inheritance provides the opening tension of The Passion of the Right - Angled Man . The first ...
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 |
Other editions - View all
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