Description
Book SynopsisThis book looks at how poems work, showing how they speak to historical, ethical, and aesthetic questions. It also demonstrates how to read poetry—how to go beyond an elementary approach, to recover the sheer pleasure of good poems.
Trade Review“This brilliantly written work is authentic literary criticism: sharp, perceptive, learned, original, individual, and life-enhancing. The scholarship is both astonishing and in itself a mode of wit; its handling is exquisite. The book establishes Cook as a first-rate critic.”—Harold Bloom, Yale University.
Table of ContentsForeword; Introduction; Part I. Empire, War, Nation: 1. Eliot, Keynes, and Empire: The Waste Land; 2. Schemes against coercion: Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Bishop, and others; 3. Fables of war in Elizabeth Bishop; 4. Faulkner, typology and black history in Go Down, Moses; 5. A seeing and unseeing in the eye: Canadian literature and the sense of place; Part II. Culture and the Uses of memory: Allusion: 6. Questions of allusion; 7. The language of scripture in Wordsworth's Prelude; 8. The senses of Eliot's salvages; 9. Wallace Stevens and the King James bible; 10. Birds in paradise: revisions of a topos in Milton, Keats, Whitman, Stevens, and Ammons; Part III. Poetry at Play: 11. Melos versus logos, or, why doesn't God sing? Some thoughts on Milton's wisdom; 12. The poetics of modern punning; Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and others; 13. Riddles, charms, and fictions in Wallace Stevens; 14. The function of riddles at the present time; 15. The flying griphos: in pursuit of enigma from Aristophanes to Tournesol, with stops in Carroll, Ariosto, and Dante; Part IV. Practice: 16. Ghost rhymes and how they work; 17. Methought as dream formula in Shakespeare; Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, and others; 18. Reading a poem: on John Hollander's 'owl' 19. Teaching poetry: accurate songs, or thinking-in-poetry; Appendix; Notes; Indices; Acknowledgments.
