The Virtues of Poetry - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Virtues of Poetry write by James Longenbach. This book was released on 2013-03-05. The Virtues of Poetry available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. An illuminating look at the many forms of poetry's essential excellence by James Longenbach, a writer with "an ear as subtle and assured as any American poet now writing" (John Koethe) "This book proposes some of the virtues to which the next poem might aspire: boldness, change, compression, dilation, doubt, excess, inevitability, intimacy, otherness, particularity, restraint, shyness, surprise, and worldliness. The word ‘virtue' came to English from Latin, via Old French, and while it has acquired a moral valence, the word in its earliest uses gestured toward a magical or transcendental power, a power that might be embodied by any particular substance or act. With vices I am not concerned. Unlike the short-term history of taste, which is fueled by reprimand or correction, the history of art moves from achievement to achievement. Contemporary embodiments of poetry's virtues abound, and only our devotion to a long history of excellence allows us to recognize them." –from James Longenbach's preface The Virtues of Poetry is a resplendent and ultimately moving work of twelve interconnected essays, each of which describes the way in which a particular excellence is enacted in poetry. Longenbach closely reads poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Bishop, and Ashbery (among others), sometimes exploring the ways in which these writers transmuted the material of their lives into art, and always emphasizing that the notions of excellence we derive from art are fluid, never fixed. Provocative, funny, and astute, The Virtues of Poetry is indispensable for readers, teachers, and writers. Longenbach reminds us that poetry delivers meaning in exacting ways, and that it is through its precision that we experience this art's lasting virtues.
The Resistance to Poetry
The Resistance to Poetry - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Resistance to Poetry write by James Longenbach. This book was released on 2009-08-07. The Resistance to Poetry available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Poems inspire our trust, argues James Longenbach in this bracing work, because they don't necessarily ask to be trusted. Theirs is the language of self-questioning—metaphors that turn against themselves, syntax that moves one way because it threatens to move another. Poems resist themselves more strenuously than they are resisted by the cultures receiving them. But the resistance to poetry is quite specifically the wonder of poetry. Considering a wide array of poets, from Virgil and Milton to Dickinson and Glück, Longenbach suggests that poems convey knowledge only inasmuch as they refuse to be vehicles for the efficient transmission of knowledge. In fact, this self-resistance is the source of the reader's pleasure: we read poetry not to escape difficulty but to embrace it. An astute writer and critic of poems, Longenbach makes his case through a sustained engagement with the language of poetry. Each chapter brings a fresh perspective to a crucial aspect of poetry (line, syntax, figurative language, voice, disjunction) and shows that the power of poetry depends less on meaning than on the way in which it means—on the temporal process we negotiate in the act of reading or writing a poem. Readers and writers who embrace that process, Longenbach asserts, inevitably recoil from the exaggeration of the cultural power of poetry in full awareness that to inflate a poem's claim on our attention is to weaken it. A graceful and skilled study, The Resistance to Poetry honors poetry by allowing it to be what it is. This book arrives at a critical moment—at a time when many people are trying to mold and market poetry into something it is not.
The Poems of Phillis Wheatley
The Poems of Phillis Wheatley - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Poems of Phillis Wheatley write by Phillis Wheatley. This book was released on 2012-03-15. The Poems of Phillis Wheatley available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. At the age of 19, Phillis Wheatley was the first black American poet to publish a book. Her elegies and odes offer fascinating glimpses of the beginnings of African-American literary traditions. Includes a selection from the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
Virtues in Verse
Virtues in Verse - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Virtues in Verse write by Berton Braley. This book was released on 1993. Virtues in Verse available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. From the author of FIRST PRIZE, a thriller about an indomitable American businessman whose integrity is pitted against the machinations of three governments. Merritt Fury, an American entrepreneur, savors his return to glamorous Hong Kong to meet with his itinerant business partners, until the irrational behavior of some of them sours his interest in the firm. Harry Briscoe, a senior partner whose business acumen Fury admires, offers his colleagues an ultimatum: agree to pay for the expansion of the firm's tungsten mine, or dissolve the partnership. Fury argues against the scheme, but Briscoe & others seem impervious to reason. And Fury soon realizes that he is the least welcome of all among Briscoe's partners. When Fury decides to stay in the partnership, he learns just how unwelcome he is. He is attacked in his hotel room, almost assassinated by a British secret agent, & courted by Amber Lee, a beautiful government economist who packs an automatic pistol. And when he is kidnapped, he grasps that he is the pivotal factor in a double conspiracy, & that the deadly conflict between his own integrity & the pragmatism of his colleagues could change the future of Hong Kong.
Verses of Virtue
Verses of Virtue - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Verses of Virtue write by Elizabeth Beall Phillips. This book was released on 2012-10-01. Verses of Virtue available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Without a vision for femininity and virtue, Christian womanhood will not survive the twenty-first century. The time has come to sing the praises of motherhood, to extol the blessings of beautiful girlhood, and to cast a vision for hearth and home. Poetry and prose are crucial components in this mission of vision communication. Beall Phillips seeks to revive this vision. In ''Verses of Virtue'' she draws from some of the most heart-warming and inspirational verses from Scripture, America's illustrious past, and even antiquity to provide women with a volume brimming with encouragement.
