Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555974600 ISBN 13: 9781555974602

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2007

Synopsis

An essential collection of essays by important contemporary poets about the forms and rhetorical strategies of lyric poetry

We are delighted when we recognize patterns and continuities, as we are delighted by a new poem's radical adjustment of, critique of, rejection of, or simple application of those patterns and modes. A poem means something because of previous poems.
―from the Introduction

Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry is a significant new book on poetry from its earliest, traditional roots to its most recent and fractured forms. The essays gathered here, by an array of brilliant contemporary poets, explore the history of the lyric poem, its rhetorical modes and strategies. How does the lyric operate in an elegy, a love poem, or an ode? How is meaning conveyed by a pastoral poem, the sublime, the narrative? How does the lyric investigate nature, beauty, and time? How are these lyric forms and strategies received? Radiant Lyre gives the contemporary reader a sense of the origin, evolution, and present status of the modes and means of lyric poetry.

David Baker and Ann Townsend have assembled an important anthology, vital to any serious reader of poetry. Contributors include Linda Gregerson, Richard Jackson, Eric Pankey, Carl Phillips, and Stanley Plumly.

About this title

About the Author

David Baker is the author of Midwest Eclogue and Heresy and the Ideal: On
Contemporary Poetry. He is the poetry editor of The Kenyon Review.

Ann Townsend is the author of two collections of poems, The Coronary Garden and Dime Store Erotics.

From Publishers Weekly

This collection of 25 essays by seven prominent poet-scholars-incluidng the editors, Stanley Plumly, Linda Gregerson and Carl Phillips-grew out of a panel at the 2000 Associated Writing Programs conference, but the end result is far more engaging and rigorous than such a beginning might suggest. Rather than trying to cover lyric poetry's many hybrid permutations, the editors wisely narrow their focus to three primary "modes"-the elegy, the love poem, and the ode. They then address four further categories, or "lyric means," rooted in core poetic "problems"-those of nature, beauty, people, and time. Approaching their subject from the shared perspective that "lyric poetry is itself a kind of persuasion," and generously quoting from numerous poems along the way, the essayists draw on their respective areas of expertise to discuss what quickly becomes an impressive range of poets, including Sappho, Horace, Petrarch, Donne, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Millay, Stevens, Pavese, Bogan, Hass, Salamun and many others. Despite the writers' depth and breadth of knowledge, the essays are eminently readable, foregoing critical theory in favor of a deep engagement with poetics. Though an advanced poetry scholar might not find a lot of profoundly new arguments here, (s)he nonetheless might enjoy the essayists' close readings and carefully drawn connections. Other poetry readers should find the book wonderfully engaging, enlightening, and at times, lyrical.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1555974600
• ISBN 13: 9781555974602
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Baker David, Townsend Ann