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The Value of Poetry shows how and why poetry matters in the contemporary world and demonstrates what poems can offer to twenty-first century readers. It argues that poems are vital spaces in which the complexities of thought, feeling, and memory are shaped and displayed, and that poems offer unique and crucial forms of readerly experience.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. Attention and Play; 2. Worlds and Selves; 3. Feeling Thought; 4. Recollection; Conclusion.
About the author
Eric Falci is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966-2010 (2012) and the Cambridge Introduction to British Poetry, 1945-2010 (2015), as well as a number of essays on twentieth-and twenty-first-century Irish and British poetry. Along with Paige Reynolds, he is the co-editor of Irish Literature in Transition, 1980-2020 (2020). His first book of poetry, Late Along the Edgelands, appeared in 2019.
Summary
The Value of Poetry shows how and why poetry matters in the contemporary world and demonstrates what poems can offer to twenty-first century readers. It argues that poems are vital spaces in which the complexities of thought, feeling, and memory are shaped and displayed, and that poems offer unique and crucial forms of readerly experience.
Additional text
'A powerful, eloquent defense of poetry, alive to its intricacy, complexity, and variety, this book offers a riveting account of poetry's special strengths and capacities. Falci illuminates poetry's play, materiality, and formal resources; its staging of subjectivity's fractured multiplicity; its intertwining of thought and feeling; and its drive to recollect the irretrievable past. Grounded in rich, multivalent readings of contemporary poems of many different kinds, this is one of the very best recent books on poetry.' Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia
