Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry

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University of Arkansas Press, Apr 1, 2000 - Poetry - 291 pages
Heresy 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

Contents

On T R Hummer
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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About the author (2000)

David Baker is professor of English and holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of creative writing at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, and he is on the faculty of the MFA low-residency program at Warren Wilson College. He is the poetry editor of the The Kenyon Review.

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