Read more
Zusatztext "Absorbing...full of Hirsch's passion." — The New Yorker "Edward Hirsch’s “A Poet’s Glossary” is an instant classic that belongs on the bookshelf of every serious poet and literature student...Hirsch explains them all with the ease of a tour guide who has spent a lifetime learning the territory...The more you read in this insightful book, the more you’ll feel a part of a communal journey that has continued for thousands of years" — Washington Post "A glossary is useful, welcome, sometimes fun, but rarely, if ever, a catalyst for astonishment. Leave it to revered poet, poetry apostle, and glossator extraordinaire Hirsch ( The Living Fire , 2010) to turn this humble resource into a vibrant, polyglot, world-circling, century-spanning, mind-expanding work of profound scholarship and literary art ...A thrilling 'repertoire of poetic secrets,' this radiant compendium is shaped by Hirsch’s abiding gratitude for the demands and power, illumination, and solace of poetry, 'a human fundamental.'" — Booklist (starred review) "Offering definitions, a discussion of poetic techniques, and an unalloyed spiritual quality to his work...This compilation of stimulating information and of beautiful writing by a master of expression is for all who love language, not just poets." — Library Journal (starred review) Informationen zum Autor EDWARD HIRSCH is a celebrated poet and peerless advocate for poetry. A MacArthur fellow, he has published ten books of poems and six books of prose. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for literature. He serves as president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and lives in Brooklyn. Preface This book?—?one person’s work, a poet’s glossary?—?has grown, as if naturally, out of my lifelong interest in poetry, my curiosity about its vocabulary, its forms and genres, its histories and traditions, its classical, romantic, and modern movements, its various outlying groups, its small devices and large mysteries?—?how it works. I hope it will be pleasurable to read and useful to study. It’s intended both for initiated and uninitiated readers, something to keep at hand, a compendium of discoveries that has befriended me. It’s a book of familiar and unfamiliar terms, some archaic, others modern, some with long and complicated histories, others newly minted. The alphabetical format may feel cool, but the hand that made the art was warm, and this book is animated by the practitioners who made poetry their own: the rational and the irrational, the lettered and the unschooled, those who would storm the barricades and tear down the castle, those who would rebuild it, the high priests of art, the irreverent tricksters, the believers and the skeptics, the long-lived purists and the doomed romantics, the holy eccentrics, the critics, the craftsmen, and the seers (singers, chanters, listeners, readers, writers); my quarrelsome friends, an extended family of makers. I’ve tried to figure out what they’ve been up to over the centuries. This book is as definitive, inclusive, and international as I could make it?—?the reader will find terms from a wide variety of poetries, oral and written, lyric and epic. I’ve included examples whenever feasible. But it’s also selective?—?I’ve inevitably followed my own interests and inclinations. This project has something of the madness of a Borgesian encyclopedia, since every culture has its own poetry, usually in its own language. It would be impossible to include all the terms in all the languages. I’ve explained what I can. I’m grounded in ou...