Poems of Ambrose Bierce - Hardcover

Bierce, Ambrose

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803212461 ISBN 13: 9780803212466

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 1995

Synopsis

Ambrose Bierce is one of the most colorful figures in American literary history. A writer whose Devil's Dictionary remains the delight of misanthropes and fans of satire throughout the English-speaking world, he was also a master of the short story form. From the late 1860s through the early 1900s, he worked as a journalist, gaining wide renown in the 1890s and 1900s as a satirical columnist for William Randolph Hearst’s chain of newspapers. In 1913 Bierce traveled to Mexico and joined Pancho Villa’s army as an observer. He disappeared late that year and his fate has been a matter of dispute ever since.

 

The poems that Bierce wrote throughout his career are less well known than his stories, journalistic pieces, and aphoristic observations on human folly. Nevertheless, his work as a poet, as critic Donald Sidney-Fryer has argued, "clearly merits the attention of the discriminating lover and student of poetry." Varied in form and subject matter, most of his poems are (not surprisingly) satires.

 

This volume contains a generous selection of Bierce’s poems; they are alternately ironic, melancholy, bitter, and wickedly amusing. There are also fifteen essays and letters on poetry, poets, and such topics as "Wit and Humor" and "The Passing of Satire." Certainly there have been few authors more intimately familiar with wit and satire than the brilliant, iconoclastic Bierce. As editor M. E. Grenander makes plain in her introduction, both are abundantly present in this collection of "some of the most remarkable verse in American literary history."

About this title

About the Author

M. E. Grenander is a Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Internationally recognized as a leading Bierce scholar, she is the author of Ambrose Bierce. Her articles on Bierce have appeared in the Western Humanities Review, American Literary Realism, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and other publications.

Reviews

YA?A fine collection of poems, essays, and letters by the author best known for his masterful short stories. The poems are satirical and vibrant and make a fine addition to his body of work.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Bierce (1842-1914?) defined poetry as "[a] form of expression peculiar to the Land beyond the Magazines." Whatever he may have meant by that, Bierce was himself a poet, although his poetic output is less well known than his acerbic satires, journalistic pieces, and other writings. Now Grenander, a leading Bierce scholar, has brought together a representative sampling of Bierce's poems, along with essays and letters concerning poets and poetry, including "Wit and Humor" and "The Passing of Satire." Bierce's wit is evidenced throughout, as is a vulnerability and tenderness that one rarely sees in his prose: "I fell asleep and dreamed that I/Was flung, like Vulcan, from the sky;/Like him, was lamed-another part:/His leg was crippled, and my heart./I woke in time to see my love/conceal a letter in her glove." Most of the writings brought together here are also to be found in the multivolume The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (Gordian Pr., 1911; 1966. reprint.). Libraries owning the earlier set may not need to consider this new edition of poetry, although Grenandier's introduction brings new insight to Bierce's work.
Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0803212461
• ISBN 13: 9780803212466
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 202