Coin of the Realm Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry

by Phillips, Carl

• ISBN13: 9781555974015
• ISBN10: 1555974015
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-06-01
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• More Book Details
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Summary

The Award-winning poet Carl Phillips grapples with issues of authority, identity, and beauty in these sensual and deeply intelligent essays The "coin of the realm" is, classically, the currency that for any culture most holds value. In art, as in life, the poet Carl Phillips argues, that currency includes beauty, risk, and authority-values of meaning and complexity that all too often go disregarded. Together, these essays become an invaluable statement for the necessary-and necessarily difficult-work of the imagination and the will, even when, as Phillips states in his title essay, "the last thing that most human beings seem capable of trusting naturally-instinctively-is themselves, their own judgment."

Author Biography

Carl Phillips is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Rock Harbor and The Tether, which won the Kingsley Tufts Award; he is also the translator of Sophocles' Philoctetes. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Table of Contents

I
The Case for Beauty	3	(4)
Myth and Fable: Their Place in Poetry	7	(26)
No Rapture: The Psalms and Restiveness	33	(14)
Anomaly, Conundrum, Thy-Will-Be-Done: On the Poetry of George Herbert	47	(28)
Poetry, Consciousness, Gift: The Model of T.S. Eliot	75	(18)
Association in Poetry	93	(20)
A Brief Stop on the Trail of the Prose Poem	113	(18)
II
Interview (Conducted by Nick Flynn)	131	(12)
Sea Level	143	(16)
III
Boon and Burden: Identity in Contemporary American Poetry	159	(22)
Another and Another Before That: Some Thoughts on Reading	181	(10)
The Book as Bridge?	191	(10)
Abstraction on Parnassus: American Poetry of the 1950's	201	(14)
On George Oppen's "Psalm"	215	(4)
Twist, Tact, and Metaphysics: Gwendolyn Brooks's A light and diplomatic bird"	219	(8)
Vision in Control: Sylvia Plath's "Winter Trees"	227	(6)
Coin of the Realm	233