How Poems Think - Softcover

Gibbons, Reginald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022627800X ISBN 13: 9780226278001

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2015

Synopsis

To write or read a poem is often to think in distinctively poetic ways—guided by metaphors, sound, rhythms, associative movement, and more. Poetry’s stance toward language creates a particular intelligence of thought and feeling, a compressed articulation that expands inner experience, imagining with words what cannot always be imagined without them. Through translation, poetry has diversified poetic traditions, and some of poetry’s ways of thinking begin in the ancient world and remain potent even now. In How Poems Think, Reginald Gibbons presents a rich gallery of poetic inventiveness and continuity drawn from a wide range of poets—Sappho, Pindar, Shakespeare, Keats, William Carlos Williams, Marina Tsvetaeva, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many others. Gibbons explores poetic temperament, rhyme, metonymy, etymology, and other elements of poetry as modes of thinking and feeling. In celebration and homage, Gibbons attunes us to the possibilities of poetic thinking.

About this title

About the Author

Reginald Gibbons is the Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. His most recent poetry collections are Creatures of a Day, a finalist for the National Book Award; and Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems and Stories.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022627800X
• ISBN 13: 9780226278001
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208