Find a copy in the library
Finding libraries that hold this item...
Details
Genre/Form: | Criticism, interpretation, etc |
---|---|
Document Type: | Book |
All Authors / Contributors: |
John Hollander |
ISBN: | 0300042930 9780300042931 0300049048 9780300049046 |
OCLC Number: | 17805901 |
Notes: | "Some of these essays originally appeared, often in different form, in other places"--Preface. |
Description: | x, 262 pages ; 25 cm |
Contents: | Turnings and Fashionings -- Questions of Poetry -- Poetic Answers -- Poetic Imperatives -- Garlands of Her Own: Bondage, Work, and Freedom -- Necessary Hieroglyphs -- Breaking into Song: Some Notes on Refrain -- Spenser's Undersong -- The Footing of His Feet: A Long Line Leads to Another -- Dallying Nicely with Words: Poetic Linguistics -- The Poetics of Character -- The Philosopher's Cat: Examples and Fictions. |
Responsibility: | John Hollander. |
Abstract:
Hollander discusses different levels of patterning in verse, examining how such rhetorical schemes as rhyme, word order, and stanza form not only support and display figures of speech, but often themselves become the strongest and most moving of metaphors. He explains that devices such as rhetorical questions and imperatives, inversions, egregiously long lines, and sonnet pattern and refrain all exist in poetry to tell stories about the way the poems operate. He also focuses on larger issues in poetics in terms of their figurative use: concepts such as "character" and "occasion" and, finally, the ways in which the differences between example and metaphor point up the contrasts between philosophers' and poets' stances toward their own language. Throughout, because of his view that poetry does indeed represent the world of which it is part, Hollander implicitly opposes certain positions taken both by recent literary theory and its self-designated "humanist" antagonists.
Reviews

