The Art of Poetry How to Read a Poem

by Wolosky, Shira

• ISBN13: 9780195138702
• ISBN10: 0195138708
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-10-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

In The Art of Poetry, Shira Wolosky provides a dazzling introduction to an art whose emphasis on verbal music, wordplay, and dodging the merely literal makes it at once the most beguiling and most challenging of literary forms. A uniquely comprehensive, step-by-step introduction to poetic form, The Art of Poetry moves progressively from smaller units such as the word, line, and image, to larger features such as verse forms and voice. In fourteen engaging, beautifully written chapters, Wolosky explores in depth how poetry does what it does while offering brilliant readings of some of the finest lyric poetry in the English and American traditions. Both readers new to poetry and poetry veterans will be moved and enlightened as Wolosky interprets work by William Shakespeare, John Donne, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, and others. The book includes a superb two-chapter discussion of the sonnet's form and history, and represents the first poetry guide to introduce gender as a basic element of analysis. In contrast to many existing guides, which focus on selected formal aspects like metrics or present definitions and examples in a handbook format, The Art of Poetry covers the full landscape of poetry's subtle art while showing readers how to comprehend a poetic text in all its dimensions. Other special features include Wolosky's consideration of historical background for the developments she discusses, and the way her book is designed to acquaint or reacquaint readers with the core of the lyric tradition in English. Lively, accessible, and original, The Art of Poetry will be a rich source of inspiration for students, general readers, and those who teach poetry.

Author Biography

Shira Wolosky is Professor of English and American Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Table of Contents

Individual Words	3	(17)
Syntax and the Poetic Line	17	(12)
Images: Simile and Metaphor	29	(12)
Metaphor and the Sonnet	41	(12)
Verse Forms: The Sonnet	53	(16)
Poetic Conventions	69	(12)
More Verse Forms	81	(12)
Personification	93	(12)
Poetic Voice	105	(14)
Gender and Poetic Voice	119	(16)
Poetic Rhythm: Meter	135	(16)
Poetic Rhythm: Sound and Rhyme	151	(16)
Rhetoric: More Tropes	167	(14)
Incomplete Figures and the Art of Reading	181	(14)
Glossary	195	(6)
Bibliographical Backgrounds	201	(16)
Index of Poems	217	(4)
Index of Poets	221	(2)
Index of Terms and Topics	223