Romanticism: Poems - Softcover

Bernard, April

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393338894 ISBN 13: 9780393338898

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011

Synopsis

"In Romanticism, the untrammeled Romantic in us struggles for expression in Art. The winner-no question-is the reader."―New Haven Review

Romanticism explores and challenges the central ideas of high Romanticism: the tragedy and gallantry of the individual’s life journey, the appeal of revolution and violence, the beckoning forces of Nature, and the estrangement from but constant longing for God. Here is a powerful argument for the primacy of strong emotion.

“Ungeliebt”
     So I offered a bargain:
     All of it, the books, the papers,
     and whatever is still brewing in my teapot head―
     All of this, I said, I will surrender
     if only I may have
     the home that I have seen in his face.
     The answer came at once: No.
     What lies you tell, and call them love.

About this title

About the Author

April Bernard is the author of four previous poetry collections and two novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. She teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.

From Publishers Weekly

Consistent throughout in its embittered tone and its focus on disillusion and failed love, Bernard's articulate fourth collection could please connoisseurs with its panoply of modes and forms: epigrams in an almost classical style, scenes from a nonexistent, racy Victorian novel (Under the Rose/ by Langley Boisvert), arias from nonexistent operas, translations from nonexistent German poems and a brace of unrhymed sonnets. Bernard has always blended sadness with literary sophistication, and after the disappointingly earnest autobiography of Swan Electric(2003) she returns to some of her strengths here. The troubles Bernard describes are finally less political than existential, familial, personal. Single poems remember the lives and the deaths of poets she knew (Jason Shinder, Aga Shahid Ali), but the whole collection turns her attention more often to the collapse, the near-death, within parts of herself. Love breaks me like a corn cake/ in a boy's mouth, says one poem. A prose poem uncovers an even more striking image for Bernard's combination of raw pain and canny reserve: When I was under snow, she writes, it took a lot to persuade me to dig out, and now and then I think of that ice burrow with real longing. (June)
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Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0393338894
• ISBN 13: 9780393338898
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 72