The Resistance to Poetry - Softcover

Longenbach, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226492508 ISBN 13: 9780226492506

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2005

Synopsis

Poems inspire our trust, argues James Longenbach in this bracing work, because they don't necessarily ask to be trusted. Theirs is the language of self-questioning—metaphors that turn against themselves, syntax that moves one way because it threatens to move another. Poems resist themselves more strenuously than they are resisted by the cultures receiving them.

But the resistance to poetry is quite specifically the wonder of poetry. Considering a wide array of poets, from Virgil and Milton to Dickinson and Glück, Longenbach suggests that poems convey knowledge only inasmuch as they refuse to be vehicles for the efficient transmission of knowledge. In fact, this self-resistance is the source of the reader's pleasure: we read poetry not to escape difficulty but to embrace it.

An astute writer and critic of poems, Longenbach makes his case through a sustained engagement with the language of poetry. Each chapter brings a fresh perspective to a crucial aspect of poetry (line, syntax, figurative language, voice, disjunction) and shows that the power of poetry depends less on meaning than on the way in which it means—on the temporal process we negotiate in the act of reading or writing a poem. Readers and writers who embrace that process, Longenbach asserts, inevitably recoil from the exaggeration of the cultural power of poetry in full awareness that to inflate a poem's claim on our attention is to weaken it.

A graceful and skilled study, The Resistance to Poetry honors poetry by allowing it to be what it is. This book arrives at a critical moment—at a time when many people are trying to mold and market poetry into something it is not.

About this title

About the Author

James Longenbach is the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester and the author of four distinguished critical studies of modern literature, most recently Modern Poetry after Modernism. His two books of poems, Threshold and Fleet River, are published by the University of Chicago Press.

Review

"An intelligent, elegant and valuable defense of poetry." - John Palattella, Nation "James Longenbach's exhilarating and subtle book makes the eloquent case for the necessary unpopularity of poetry." - Adam Philips, Guardian (UK) "Longenbach's spare method is that of a poet, his careful exposition like that of a poem.... A beautiful little book." - Library Journal "Throughout nine small and expertly constellated essays, Longenbach demonstrates that poems are a form of thinking: a resistance to the clear-cut, uncomplicated thought that tries to pin them down as statements.... A compact and exponentially provocative book." - Brian Phillips, Poetry"

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0226492508
• ISBN 13: 9780226492506
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144