Classic Writings on Poetry

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "The Poet"

"[The poet] is a seer.... he is individual... he is complete in himself.... the others are as good as he, only he sees it and they do not. He is not one of the chorus. " -- Walt Whitman, from the preface to Leaves of Grass

Poetry has always given rise to interpretation, judgment, and controversy. Indeed, the history of poetry criticism is as rich and varied a journey as the history of poetry itself. But classic writings such as Emerson's essay "The Poet" and Whitman's preface to Leaves of Grass serve as more than a critical "call and response": the works are striking examples of how the finest poets themselves have written on poetics and the works of their peers and predecessors -- revealing, in the process, much about the theory and passion behind their own works.

Spanning thousands of years and including thirty-three of the most influential critical essays ever written, Classic Writings on Poetry is the first major anthology of criticism devoted exclusively to poetry. Beginning with a survey of the history of poetics and providing an introduction and brief biography for each reading, esteemed poet and critic William Harmon takes readers from Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Poetics to the Norse mythology of Snorri Sturluson's Skáldskaparmál. John Dryden's An Essay of Dramatic Poesy and Shelley's A Defence of Poetry are included, as is an excerpt from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse novel Aurora Leigh, arriving, finally, at the modernist sensibility of "Poetic Reality and Critical Unreality," by Laura (Riding) Jackson. For anyone interested in the art and artifice of poetry, Classic Writings on Poetry is a journey well worth taking.

Columbia University Press

The first major anthology of criticism devoted exclusively to poetry. Spanning thousands of years and including some of the most influential critical essays ever written, this is a collection of influential writings on poetry ranging from Aristotle to Laura (Riding) Jackson.

Library Journal

Controversy has long surrounded the poem. Sliding like an amoeba from one philosophy, culture, and generation to the next, it has only one truly defining feature: that it cannot be defined. In this groundbreaking anthology of criticism devoted strictly to poetry, poet and critic Harmon (humanities, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) collects some of the most influential writing on poetry by such philosophical royalty as Plato, Aristotle, Milton, Sir Philip Sidney, Wordsworth, and Emily Dickinson. Readers are given a peek through the hole of history's fence into the lives and worlds of our poetic geniuses and reminded of the poem's matchless role in conveying reverence, remembering wars, recording history, entertaining, expressing deep emotion, and above all, allowing the finite mind, for one moment, to contain infinity. Where Plato would consider poetry a corruptible force for youth, Sir Philip Sidney saw poetry as God's creative nature shown in humankind. Harmon not only supplies a useful survey of the history of specific poetics in the general introduction, but he also presents an introduction to each reading and a brief biography of each author. Recommended for upper-level academia and special collections in history and poetics.-Kim Harris, Rochester P.L., NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Poet, critic, and anthologist, William Harmon is the James Gordon Hanes Professor in the Humanities (English and Comparative Literature) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the editor of The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, The Top 500 Poems, and The Classic Hundred Poems, all published by Columbia, as well as The Oxford Book of American Light Verse.