The contemporary poet as artist and critic: Eight symposia - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1399638041 ISBN 13: 9781399638043

Publisher: Little, Brown and Co., 1964

Synopsis

The plan of this book may be simply In each of our eight symposia, three distinguished poets write independent critiques of a recent poem by an important contemporary - who then writes a commentary in response; the poem, the three critiques, and the author’s comment together constitute the finished symposium. As the reader will be aware, the scheme introduces something new in literary criticism, first, in calling upon POETS to perform the essential critical task; second, in calling upon the authors of the poems under consideration to comment directly on their work and on criticism of it. One effect is that critic and author are placed in a somewhat more intense relation of responsibility to each other than is usual, which provides a special interest of its own. But the most valuable effects are more direct. The authors’ comments, informing us of original intention in the poems, giving us details of background and composition we could not otherwise know, and calling our attention to aspects of the poems which the critics may have missed, are uniquely helpful both as critical sources and as critical controls. The critiques, because they are written by poets, are exceptionally free of critical prejudice, attentive to the integrity of poem and poet alike, and sensitive to the entire range of those events and devices of imagination and language whereby experience becomes poetry. As will be evident, the poems considered in this book are of quite different levels of difficulty and quite different in the tasks they set themselves. The symposia, however, are arranged simply in the chronological order of their completion, not in terms of any sense of the relative difficulty or interest or value of the poems on which they focus.

Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Co.
• Publication date: 1964
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1399638041
• ISBN 13: 9781399638043
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Editor: Anthony Ostroff