The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Its Traditions
Robert Pinsky
(Author)
21,000+ Reviews
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Description
In this book Robert Pinsky writes about contemporary poetry as it reflects its modernist and Romantic past. He isolates certain persistent ideas about poetry's situation relative to life and focuses on the conflict the poet faces between the nature of words and poetic forms on one side, and the nature of experience on the other.
The author ranges for his often surprising examples from Keats to the great modernists such as Stevens and Williams, to the contents of recent magazines. He considers work by Ammons, Ashbery, Bogan, Ginsberg, Lowell, Merwin, O'Hara, and younger writers, offering judgments and enthusiasms from a viewpoint that is consistent but unstereotyped.
Like his poetry, Robert Pinsky's criticism joins the traditional and the innovative in ways that are thoughtful and unmistakably his own. His book is a bold essay on the contemporary situation in poetry, on the dazzling achievements of modernism, and on the nature or situation of poetry itself.
Product Details
Price
$35.00
$32.55
Publisher
Princeton University Press
Publish Date
October 21, 1978
Pages
200
Dimensions
5.49 X 8.5 X 0.52 inches | 0.53 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780691013527
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Robert Pinsky is the author of several books of poetry, including Gulf Music, Jersey Rain, The Want Bone, The Figured Wheel, and At the Foundling Hospital. His bestselling translation The Inferno of Dante sets a modern standard. He was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000. Among his awards and honors are the William Carlos Williams Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the Korean Manhae Prize, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN American Center. He teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University.
Reviews
"A first-rate piece of work. I can't imagine anyone capable of reading this book and not learning from it."--Hugh Kenner
"Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talents, a poet-critic."--Robert Lowell
"The mind at work in The Situation of Poetry is lively, fresh, and critical without being obsessed by the rigor of criticism....Pinsky's book produces for our attention a wide range of contemporary poems, some for rebuke, but most for praise. His comments are brief, vivid, distinct without claiming finality, and his taste is excellent."---Denis Donoghue, New York Times Book Review
"No one can read Pinsky's writing without being provoked to thought. He comes at poetry from the side of lived and observed life, and common speech: this approach, like its opposite which comes at poetry through intertexuality, has its place in the dialectic of criticism."---Helen Vendler, The Nation
"Pinsky's careful explications of a wide selection of poems and penetrating discussions of the psychological and philosophical implications are both stimulating and informative. This book will serve ably as a guidebook for the general student of literature."--Library Journal
"Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talents, a poet-critic."--Robert Lowell
"The mind at work in The Situation of Poetry is lively, fresh, and critical without being obsessed by the rigor of criticism....Pinsky's book produces for our attention a wide range of contemporary poems, some for rebuke, but most for praise. His comments are brief, vivid, distinct without claiming finality, and his taste is excellent."---Denis Donoghue, New York Times Book Review
"No one can read Pinsky's writing without being provoked to thought. He comes at poetry from the side of lived and observed life, and common speech: this approach, like its opposite which comes at poetry through intertexuality, has its place in the dialectic of criticism."---Helen Vendler, The Nation
"Pinsky's careful explications of a wide selection of poems and penetrating discussions of the psychological and philosophical implications are both stimulating and informative. This book will serve ably as a guidebook for the general student of literature."--Library Journal
