Break, Blow, Burn
10 best books like Break, Blow, Burn (Camille Paglia): The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, Understanding Poetry, On Poetry, The Waste Land and Other Writings, Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, Collected Poems, 1943-2004, Monologue of a Dog, Poet's Choice, Lives of the Poets, The Best American Poetry 2006
| Author | Mark Strand |
| ISBN | 0393321789 |
Poetry's Ingredients: Mark Strand and Eavan Boland Explore Form
Explaining beauty is hard work. But distinguished poets Mark Strand and Eavan Boland have produced a clear, super-helpful book that unravels part of the mystery of great poems through an engaging exploration of poetic structure....
| Author | Cleanth Brooks |
| ISBN | 0030769809 |
The fourth edition of Understanding Poetry is a re-inspection of poetry. Keeping it teachable and flexible, the material allows for full and innocent immersion as well as raising inductive questions to develop critical and analytical skills. Students will be led to understand poetry as a means of...
| Author | Glyn Maxwell |
| ISBN | 1849430853 |
A collection of short essays and reflections on poetry from the acclaimed British poet Glyn Maxwell. These essays illustrates Maxwell’s poetic philosophy, that the greatest verse arises from a harmony of mind and body, and that poetic forms originate in human necessities – breath, heartbeat,...
| Author | T.S. Eliot |
| ISBN | 0375759344 |
Also includes Prufrock and Other Observations, Poems (1920), and The Sacred Wood
Introduction by Mary Karr
First published in 1922, “The Waste Land,” T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece, is not only one of the key works of modernism but also one of the greatest poetic achievements of the...
| Author | Jane Hirshfield |
| ISBN | 0060925760 |
A combination of spiritual poetry and history of the poets. Really expansive, beautiful, informative collection.
My favorites were:
p 21, Zi Ye
All night I could not sleep / because of the moonlight on my bed. / I kept on hearing a voice calling: / Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered...
| Author | Richard Wilbur |
| ISBN | 0156030799 |
With a distinguished career spanning more than sixty years, Richard Wilbur stands as one of America's preeminent men of letters. Collected Poems 1943-2004 is the comprehensive collection of Wilbur's astonishing, timeless work. It will serve as the most referenced trove of this beloved poet's best...
| Author | Wisława Szymborska |
| ISBN | 0151012202 |
From a writer whom Charles Simic calls "one of the finest poets living" comes a collection of witty, compassionate, contemplative, and always surprising poems. Szymborska writes with verve about everything from love unremembered to keys mislaid in the grass. The poems will appear, for the first...
| Author | Edward Hirsch |
| ISBN | 0156032678 |
Edward Hirsch began writing a column called "Poet’s Choice" in the Washington Post Book World in 2002. This book brings together those enormously popular columns, some of which have been revised and expanded, to present a minicourse in world poetry. Poet’s Choice includes the work of more than...
| Author | Michael Schmidt |
| ISBN | 0375706046 |
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
In this stunning volume of epic breadth, Michael Schmidt connects the lives and works of more than 300 poets over the last 700 years--spanning distant shores from Scotland to Australia to the Caribbean, all sharing the English language.
Schmidt...
| Author | Billy Collins |
| ISBN | 0743257596 |
Billy Collins, one of our most beloved poets, has chosen poems of wit, humor, imagination, and surprise, in a range of styles and forms, for The Best American Poetry 2006. The result is a celebration of the pleasures of poetry.
In his charming and candid introduction Collins explains how he...
U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass considers some of the twentiethcentury poets who bring him pleasure: Robert Lowll, JamesWright, Tomas Transtromer, Joseph Brodsky, Yvor Winters,Robert Creeley, James McMichael, Czeslaw Milosz, and others,in this, his first collection of essays. Originally published...
| Author | Cole Swensen |
| ISBN | 0393333752 |
As Cole Swensen argues in the introduction to this comprehensive new anthology, the long-acknowledged "fundamental division" between experimental and traditional is disappearing in American poetry in favor of hybrid approaches that blend trends from accessible lyricism to linguistic exploration....
| Author | Stephen Burt |
| ISBN | 1555975216 |
Essays and critical writings on contemporary poetry by Stephen Burt, "the finest critic of his generation" (Lucie Brock-Broido)
Stephen Burt's Close Calls with Nonsense provokes readers into the elliptical worlds of Rae Armantrout, Paul Muldoon, C. D. Wright, and other contemporary...
| Author | Randall Jarrell |
| ISBN | 0813021081 |
About Poetry and the Age:
"Perhaps the most comprehensive and certainly the most detailed of all studies of modern poetry."-- Delmore Schwartz, New York Times Book Review
"Randall Jarrell’s book about poetry and the criticism of poetry pulls the bung-cork out of the barrel. The...
| Author | Edmund Wilson |
| ISBN | 0374529272 |
Published in 1931, Axel's Castle was Edmund Wilson's first book of literary criticism--a landmark book that explores the evolution of the French Symbolist movement and considers its influence on six major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust,...
The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan
| Author | George Steiner |
| ISBN | 0811219453 |
With his hallmark forceful discernment, George Steiner presents in The Poetry of Thought his magnum opus: an examination of more than two millennia of Western culture, staking out his claim for the essential oneness of great thought and great style. Sweeping yet precise, moving from essential detail...
| Author | Helen Vendler |
| ISBN | 0312257066 |
“Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor.” It didn't take me long while reading Helen Vendler's introduction to poetry to remember this quote from Wallace Stevens, as so much of the best poetry deals with the flouting of conventions and the subverting of cliches. Perhaps the formulaic...
The Best American Poetry 2010
| Author | Amy Gerstler |
| ISBN | 1439181454 |
AMY GERSTLER’S COMMITMENT TO INNOVATIVE POETRY that conveys meaning, feeling, wit, and humor informs the cross section of poems in the 2010 edition of The Best American Poetry. The works collected here represent the wealth, the breadth, and the tremendous energy of poetry in the United States...
The Poets Laureate Anthology
| Author | Elizabeth Hun Schmidt |
| ISBN | 0393061817 |
This is a wonderful, huge volume of poetry anthologizing all those poets who've served as the nation's Poet Laureate or--as the position was originally appointed--as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. They range from Joseph Auslander (1937) to W. S. Merwin (2010), the outgoing laureate...
| Author | Philip Levine |
| ISBN | 0307272230 |
A superb new collection from “a great American poet . . . still at work on his almost-song of himself” (The New York Times Book Review).
In both lively prose poems and more formal verse, Philip Levine brings us news from everywhere: from Detroit, where exhausted workers try to find a decent...
| Author | Don Share |
| ISBN | 0226750701 |
When Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912, she began with an image: the Open Door. “May the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius!” For a century, the most important and enduring poets have walked through that door—William...
| Author | Terry Eagleton |
| ISBN | 1405151412 |
Lucid, entertaining and full of insight, How To Read A Poem is designed to banish the intimidation that too often attends the subject of poetry, and in doing so to bring it into the personal possession of the students and the general reader.
Offers a detailed examination of poetic form and...
| Author | Oscar Wilde |
| ISBN | 1557133689 |
I’ve just been inspired.
As if my admiration for this man, for this genius, couldn’t get any higher. Wilde…..Wilde is wonderful. Wonderful Wilde, that’s what I’m going to call him from now on. Wonderful Wilde offers a very compelling argument in here. Being a literary critic and...
