Western Wind : An Introduction to Poetry

by NIMS JOHN FREDERICK

• ISBN13: 9780073031804
• ISBN10: 0073031801
• Edition: 4th
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-06-11
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages

Summary

"WESTERN WIND" is an introduction to the elements of craft that make poetry sing, a superior anthology of classic and contemporary poetry, and a guide for students to poetics, writing about poetry, and critical theory. In this text, two well respected poets bring their love of the craft of poetry into a book that teaches as well as inspires. The text also includes exercises, chapter summaries, games, diagrams, illustrations, and 4-color reproductions of great works of art. .

Table of Contents

Part One: The Senses

1. WHERE EXPERIENCE STARTS: The Image

The Role Of The Senses

Anonymous, Western Wind

Archibald Macleish, Eleven

Sappho, There's A Man

T.S. Eliot, Preludes

Anonymous, Brief Autumnal

The Specific Image

Ezra Pound, In A Station Of The Metro Alba ("As cool as the pale wet leaves...")

Anthony Hecht, The End Of The Weekend

Anonymous, Sir Patrick Spens

Exercises And Diversions

Brewester Ghiselin, Rattler, Alert

Sappho, Leaving Crete, Come Visit Again

2. WHAT'S IT LIKE? Simile, Metaphor and Other Figures

Simile And Metaphor

Robinson Jeffers, The Purse-Seine

Robert Frost, The Silken Tent

Emily Dickinson, My Life Had Stood--A Loaded Gun

Linda Pastan, Returning

Margaret Atwood, Habitation

William Butler Yeats, No Second Troy

Robert Frost, A Patch Of Old Snow

Helen Chasin, City Pigeons

Analogy

Walter De La Mare, All But Blind

Synesthia

Allusion

Alexander Pope, Intended For Sir Isaac Newton

Personfication, Mythology

Karl Shapiro, A Cut Flower

William Butler Yeats, Leda And The Swan

Walter Savage Landor, Dirce

Exercises And Diversions

Alan Shapiro, Against Poets

3. THE BROKEN COIN: The Use Of Symbol

Synecdoche, Metonymy

The Symbol

Howard Nemerov, Money

Plato, The Apple

George Herbert, Hope

William Blake, The Sick Rose

Robert Frost, Acquainted With The Night

Saint John Of The Cross, The Dark Night

Thing-Poems

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Merry-Go-Round

William Carlos Williams, Nantucket

Karl Shapiro, Girls Working In Banks

Allegory

Sir Thomas Wyatt, My Galley Charged with Forgetfulness

Kingsley Amis, A Note on Wyatt

Billy Collins, The Death of Allegory

Exercises and Diversions

John Crowe Ransom, Good Ships

Carl Sandburg, A Fence

4. BINOCULAR VISION: Antipoetry, Paradox, Irony, the Withheld Image

Antipoetry

William Shakespeare, Winter

Francis P. Osgood, Winter Fairyland In Vermont

Elizabeth Bishop, Filling Station

Walt Whitman, Beauty

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130

Paradox

Robert Graves, The Face In The Mirror

Alexander Pope, From Essay On Man

Irony

Understatement--The Withheld Image

Simonides, On The Spartan Dead At Thermopylae

X.J. Kennedy, Loose Woman

Overstatement

Robert Graves, Spoils

Exercises & Diversions

Rod Taylor, Dakota: October, 1822: Hunkpapa Warrior

Wallace Stevens, The Emperor Of Ice-Cream

Part Two: The Emotions.

5. THE COLOR OF THOUGHT: The Emotions in Poetry

The Role Of Emotion

William Butler Yeats, The Spur

Walter Savage Landor, Alas! 'Tis Very Sad To Hear

Dick Davis, Desire

Ammianus, Epitaph of Nearchos

W.H. Auden, The Shield of Achilles

Sense And Sentimentality

Anonymous, The Unquiet Grave

Anonymous, Papa's Letter

John Crowe Ransom, Bells For John Whiteside's Daughter

Algernon Charles Swinburne, Etude Realiste (I)

James Wright, A Song For The Middle Of The Night

Will Allen Dromoole, Old Ladies

John Crowe Ransom, Blue Girls

May Swenson, Cat & The Weather

William Stafford, Traveling Through The Dark

Mary Tacher Higginson, Ghost-Flowers

Theodore Roethke, The Geranium

Laurence Hope, Youth

Exercises and Diversions

Kenneth Fearing, Yes, The Agency Can Handle That

Part Three: The Words.

6. MACHINE FOR MAGIC: The Fresh Usual Words

Living Words

Kenneth Patchen, Moon, Sun, Sleep, Birds, Live

Robert Frost, Dust Of Snow; Neither Out Far Nor In Deep

Emily Dickinson, A Narrow Fellow In The Grass;

Less Is More

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Break, Break, Break

A.E. Housman, Along the Field as We Came By

William Butler Yeats, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

Ezra Pound, The Bath Tub

Hilaire Belloc, On His Books

Robert Frost, The Wrights' Biplane

William Stafford, Godiva County, Montana

W.H. Auden, The Wanderer

Exercises and Diversions

Randall Jarrell, The Knight, Death, And The Devil

Part Four: The Sounds.

7. GOLD IN THE ORE: The Sounds Of English

Gail Tremblay, Not Sense

Vowels

Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Robert Frost, Once By The Pacific

E.E. Cummings, Chansons Innocentes, I

Consonants

Exercises and Diversions

John Milton, On The Late Massacre In Piedmont

8. WORKING WITH GOLD: The Devices of Sound

Language As Mimicry

John Updike, Player Piano

A Reason For Rhyme?

Erza Pound, Alba ("When the nightingale . . .")

Off-Rhyme

Wilfred Owen, Anthem For Doomed Youth;Arms And The Boy

The Music Of Poetry

Anonymous, The Streets of Laredo

Charles Causley, Lord Lovelace

Exercises & Diversions

T.S. Eliot, New Hampshire

William Butler Yeats, Under Ben Bulben, VI

Edwin Arlington Robinson, The Dark Hills

Part Five: The Rhythms.

9. THE DANCER AND THE DANCE: The Play of Rhythms

Rhythm

Repetition As Rhythm

Robert Graves, Counting The Beats

Walt Whitman, From Leaves Of Grass

The Rhythm Of Accent

A Note On Scansion

Christian Morgenstern, Fish's Nightsong

Iambic Pentameter

Variations On Iambic

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 66

Meter And Rhythm

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

Line Length

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

A.E. Housman, I to My Perils

Theodore Roethke, My Papa's Waltz

Exercises and Diversions

William Browne, On The Countess Dowager Of Pembroke

Katherine McAlpine, That Ghastly Night in Dover

10. DIFFERENT DRUMMERS: Rhythms Old and New

Other Syllable-Stress Rhythms

George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Destruction Of Sennacherib

William Blake, Ah, Sun-Flower

Strong-Stress Rhythms

Annonymous, I Have Labored Sore

Richard Wilbur, Funk

Anonymous, From Ubi Sunt Quiante Nos Fuerunt?

E.E. Cummings, if everything happens that can't be done

Dudley Randall, Blackberry Sweet

Sprung Rhythm

A Word About Quantity

William Meredith, Effort At Speech

Syllabic Meter

James Tate, Miss Cho Composes In The Cafeteria

Robert Morgan, Grandma's Bureau

Dave Etter, Romp

Free Verse, Free Rhythns

Ezra Pound, The Return

Stephen Crane, A Man Said To The Universe

The Variable Foot

William Carlos Williams, The Descent

Concrete Poetry

Emmett Williams, Like Attracts Like

The Prose Poem

Hanjorg Mayer, Oil

Exercises and Diversions

William Carlos Williams, Iris

Part Six: The Mind.

11. THE SHAPE OF THOUGHT: We Go A-Sentencing

The Sentence

Eugenio Montale, The Eel

Gwendolyn Brooks, We, Real Cool

Use Of Connectives

Jacques Prevert, The Message

Parallelism

Walt Whitman, I Hear America Singing

Gail Tremblay, It Is Important

Sentence Structure

E.E. Cummings, Me up at does

Peter Viereck, To Helen Of Troy (N.Y.)

Robert Frost, Beyond Words

Alice Fulton, What I Like

Kenneth Patchen, O All down within Pretty Meadow

John Clare, Remember Dear Mary

Levels Of Language

Robert Graves, The Persian Version

Edward Field, Curse of the Cat Woman

New Words, New Language

E.E. Cummings, wherelings whenlings

Exercises & Diversions

12. GOLDEN NUMBERS: On Nature and Form

William Butler Yeats, The Statues

John Donne, The Anniversary

William Butler Yeats, The Lover Mourns For The Loss Of Love

Fixed Stanza Forms

Howard Nemerov, "Good-Bye," Said The River, "I'm Going Downstream"

X.J. Kennedy, On a Given Book

Bruce Bennett, On Being Immortalized in Bronze

Amareh, I'll Hide Within My Poems (trans. Dick Davis)

Robert Herrick, Upon Julia's Clothes

William Wordsworth, A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

Edgar Allen Poe, To Helen

Fixed Forms For Poems

George Meredith, Lucifer in Starlight

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29

Howard Nemerov, A Primer of the Daily Round

Gwendolyn Brooks, The Rites For Cousin Vit

Marilyn Hacker, Dear Julie, Provincetown Is Not Antibes

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty

Mona Van Duyn, Sonnet For Minimalists

Francois Villon, Ballade to His Mistress

Frances Cornford, To A Fat Lady Seen From The Train

Frederick Morgan, 1904

Lady Izumi Shikibu, Lying Here Alone

Adelaine Crapsey, Cinquain: A Warning

Basho, Evening Darkens. Hunched; Lightning In The Clouds!

Richard Wilbur, Sleepless At Crown Point

R.S. Gwynn, Black Helicopters

Anonymous, Sir Isaac Newton

E. William Seaman, Higgledy-piggledy

Paul Pascal, Tact

Anonymous, There Was A Young Lady Of Tottenham

Exercises and Diversions

A.E. Housman, With Rue My Heart Is Laden

Thomas Hardy, I Look Into My Glass

13. A HEAD ON ITS SHOULDERS: Common Sense, Uncommon Sense

Common Sense

Miller Williams: A Poem For Emily

John Berryman, He Resigns

William Wordsworth, The Solitary Reaper

Will Allen Dromgoole, Building The Bridge

Uncommon Sense

Thomas Lux, My Grandmother's Funeral

Lisel Mueller, Palindrome

Stevie Smith, Our Bog Is Dood

Federico Gracia Lorca, Sleepwalker's Ballad

Exercises and Diversions

Anonymous, I Never Plucked-A Bumblebee

14. ADAM'S CURSE: Inspiration and Effort

Robert W. Service, Inspiration

Dylan Thomas, In My Craft or Sullen Art

D.H. Lawrence, The Piano

Exercises and Diversions

A.E. Housman, I Hoed And Trenched And Weeded

William Butler Yeats, The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner

Walter De La Mare, The Stone; Slim Cunning Hands

ANTHOLOGY

Anonymous: Lord Randal; The Demon Lover

Sir Thomas Wyatt: They Flee From Me

Christopher Marlowe: The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Sir Walter Raleigh: The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd

Sir Philip Sidney: With How Sad Steps, O Moon

William Shakespeare: Sonnet 18; Sonnet 73; Sonnet 116; Sonnet 129.

Thomas Campion: My Sweetest Lesbia, Let Us Live And Love;It Fell On A Summer's Day

Thomas Nashe: Adieu, Farewell Earth's Bliss

John Donne: The Sun Rising; A Valediction: Of Weeping; A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning; Death Be Not Proud

Ben Jonson: On My First Son

Robert Herrick: Delight In Disorder

George Herbert: Redemption; Easter-Wings; Love

John Milton: Lycidas; On His Blindness

Anne Bradstreet: To My Dear And Loving Husband

Andrew Marvell: To His Coy Mistress

Katherine Philips: An Answer to Another Persuading a Lady to Marriage

Aphra Behn: Song: Love Armed

Jonathan Swift: A Description of the Morning

Thomas Gray: Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard

Christopher Smart: From Jubilate Agno

William Blake: The Tyger; London; A Poison Tree

William Wordsworth: She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways; The World Is Too Much With Us; Composed upon Westminster Bridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Kubla Khan

Walter Savage Landor: Rose Aylmer; Past Ruined Ilion Helen Lives

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ozymandias; Ode To The West Wind

John Clare: Autumn

John Keats: La Belle Dame Sans Merci; Ode To A Nightingale; To Autumn

Edward Fitzgerald: From The Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayam

Alfred Lord Tennyson: Ulysses

Robert Browning: My Last Duchess

Emily Bronte: Remembrance

Arthur Hugh Clough: The Latest Decalogue

Walt Whitman: From Leaves Of Grass; Out Of The Cradle Endlessly Rocking; When I Heard The Learn'd Astronomer; Reconciliation

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Woodspurge

Emily Dickinson: Went Up A Year This Evening; I Heard A Fly Buzz-When I Died; I Started Early-Took My Dog; Because I Could Not Stop For Death; The Wind Begun To Knead the Grass; Tell All The Truth But Tell It Slant

Algernon Charles Swinburne: Chorus from Atalanta In Calydon

Thomas Hardy: The Ruined Maid; The Self-Unseeing; The Man He Killed; The Oxen; In Time Of "The Breaking Of Nations"

Gerard Manley Hopkins: God's Grandeur; The Windhover; Felix Randal: Spring And Fall

A.E. Housman: To An Athlete Dying Young; Loveliest Of Trees, The Cherry Now

William Butler Yeats: Adam's Curse; The Cold Heaven; Sailing To Byzantium; Among School Children; A Last Confession

Edwin Arlington Robinson: The Mill; Mr. Flood's Party

Walter De La Mare: The Listeners

Robert Frost: Mending Wall, "Out, Out-", Provide, Provide, The Most Of It; The Subverted Flower

Wallace Stevens: Sunday Morning; The Snow Man; A Postcard From The Volcano; The Sense Of The Sleight -Of-Hand Man

William Carlos Williams: To Waken An Old Lady; The Red Wheelbarrow; The Dance

Ezra Pound: The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter

Marianne Moore: A Grave; A Carriage from Sweden

Edwin Muir: The Horses

T.S. Eliot: The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock

Archibald Macleish: Ars Poetica; You, Andrew Marvell

E.E. Cummings: anyone lived in a pretty how town

Jean Toomer: Reapers

Hart Crane: Poem: To Brooklyn Bridge

Robert Francis: Pitcher; Swimmer

Kenneth Fearing: Love, 20 Cents the First Quarter Mile

Langston Hughes: Dream Variations; The Negro Speaks Of Rivers

Ogden Nash: Very Like a Whale

Stevie Smith: Not Waving but Drowning

Stanley Kunitz: The Abduction

W.H. Auden: Lullaby: In Memory Of W. B. Yeats

Louis MacNeice: The Sunlight on the Garden

Theodore Roethke: Elegy for Jane; The Waking

Robert Fitzgerald: Cobb Would Have Caught It

Elizabeth Bishop: The Fish, Sandpiper, One Art

Robert Hayden: Those Winter Sundays

Muriel Rukeyser: Effort at Speech between Two People

Karl Shapiro: The Leg

John Berryman: Dream Songs, 4, 22

Randall Jarrell: Next Day

Dylan Thomas: Fern Hill

John Ciardi: Faces

Gwendolyn Brooks: The Bean Eaters

Robert Lowell: Skunk Hour; For The Union Dead

May Swenson: Stripping and Putting On

Howard Nemerov: Learning By Doing; Because You Asked About The Line Between Prose And Poetry

Richard Wilbur: The Catch; Hamlen Brook

Philip Larkin: At Grass; The Explosion

James Dickey: Cherrylog Road

Anthony Hecht: The Dover Bitch, The Book of Yolek

Donald Justice: Sonnet: The Poet At Seven; A Winter Ode to the Old Men of Lummus Park, Miami, Florida; On An Anniversary,

Maxine Kumin: The Retrieval System

Gerald Stern: The Dog

A.R. Ammons: The Constant; Cut The Grass

Allen Ginsberg: A Supermarket in California

James Merrill: Charles on Fire, The Blue Grotto

W.D. Snodgrass: Leaving the Motel

David Wagoner: On a Man Dancing by Himself in a Tavern

John Ashbery: Mixed Feelings

W.S. Merwin: Things; On the Old Way

James Wright: Autumn Begins In Martin's Ferry, Ohio; Speak

Maya Angelou: Caged Bird

Philip Levine: Keep Talking

Adrienne Rich: From Twenty-one Love Poems (VI, XVI, XVIII); The Slides; What Kind of Times Are These

Gary Snyder: An Autumn Morning In Shokoku-Ji; Prayer For The Great Family

Derek Walcott: The Villa Restaurant

Geoffrey Hill: In Memory Of Jane Fraser

Sylvia Plath: Tulips; Blackberrying; Mirror

Vern Rutsala: Words

Mark Strand: The Tunnel; Where Are the Waters of Childhood?

Mary Oliver: Shadows; The Storm

Lucille Clifton: homage to my hips

C.K. Williams: Tar

Charles Simic: Fear; Fork; Classic Ballroom Dances

Margaret Atwood: Siren Song

Stephen Dunn: At the Smithville Methodist Church

Seamus Heaney: Death Of A Naturalist; Follower; Damson

Ted Kooser: Abandoned Farmhouse

Carole Oles: To A Daughter at Fourteen Forsaking the Violin

Robert Pinsky: A Woman

Billy Collins: Passengers

Robert Hass: Meditation at Lagunitas

Michael Heffernan: Reading Aquinas

William Mathews: Mood Indigo

Sharon Olds: The Death of Marilyn Monroe, Physics

Louise Gluck: The School Children, Midnight, Purple Bathing Suit

Ellen Bryant Voigt: The Starveling; The Farmer

Margaret Benbow: Crazy Arms: Earlene Remembers

Alice Walker: Even As I Hold You

Jeanne Murray Walker: Studying Physics with My Daughter

Thomas Lux: Cellar Stairs

Marilyn Nelson: Epithalamium and Shvaree

Lawrence Raab: Learning How to Write

Yusef Komunyakaa: Facing It

Robert B. Shaw: Shut In

Leslie Marmon Silko: Prayer to the Pacific

Timothy Steele: An Aubade

David Bottoms: The Desk

August Kleinzahler: Watching Dogwood Blossoms Fall in a Parking Lot off Route 46

Julia Alvarez, Old Heroines

Carolyn Forche: For the Stranger, The Garden Shukkei-en

Dana Gioia: The Sunday News

Rodney Jones: Blasphemy

Alane Rollings: Light Years And The Love Lost in the Oleanders

Joy Harjo: Eagle Poem

Garrett Hongo: Mendocino Rose

Andrew Hudgins: The Persistence Of Nature In Our Lives

Brigit Pegeen Kelly: Song

Rita Dove: O; Testimonial; For Sophie Who’ll Be in First Grade in the Year 2000

Alice Fulton: News Of The Occluded Cyclone

Mark Jarman: From Unholy Sonnets (13)

David Mura: The Natives

Naomi Shihab Nye: Rebellion Against The North Side

Jim Simmerman: Child's Grave, Hale County, Alabama

Gary Soto: Oranges

Gjertrud Schanckenberg: Walking Home

Mary Jo Salter: Boulevard du Montparnasse

Mark Doty: Brilliance

Louise Erdrich: Jacklight

Mary Karr: Coleman

Li-Young Lee: Eating Alone

Rafael Campo: From Song Before Dying (II, III, VI)

Appendix A: Poetics

Appendix B: Writing About Poetry

Index Of Names And Titles

Index Of First Lines

Index Of Principal Terms And Topics

Permissions Acknowledgments

Photo Credits