Law Of Poetry

Contributors Include: W.H. Auden, Robert Burns, Lewis Carroll, John Ciardi, Daniel Defoe, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Rita Dove, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Martín Espada, Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, A.E. Housman, Langston Hughes, Ben Jonson, X.J. Kennedy, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ted Kooser, D.H. Lawrence, Edgar Lee Masters, W.S. Merwin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sir Walter Raleigh, Muriel Rukeyser, Carl Sandburg, William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Mona Van Duyn, Oscar Wilde, William Carlos Williams.

The place of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) in European literature is assured, and his significance for the development of German philosophy widely acknowledged. Here the focus is more specifically upon his poetics: a body of reflections on the nature of poetry and the meaning of the poet's vocation. These are found in poems and letters, in difficult (and often fragmentary) theoretical writings, and -- in the case of the 'Pindar Fragments' -- texts in which the distinction between poetry and theoretical reflection seems to be overcome. Although Hölderlin's poetics is considered from various points of view, the themes that emerge most frequently are Hölderlin's notion of a 'poetic law' or 'poetic logic', and his conception of tragedy and of what might be called the 'anti-tragic'. Also included is a new translation of Hölderlin's 'Notes' on Sophocles, which are here provided with a commentary. Charles Lewis received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cambridge University. He has taught at Princeton University, and held an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at the Free University, Berlin.

A haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry

All of the 40+ poets represented in this anthology either are or have been practicing lawyers and/or judges. Some are now working in academia, but most are still involved in law one way or another. In addition to those listed as authors on the title page of this amazon site, the anthology includes work by Paul Homer, Lawrence Joseph, Kenneth King, John Charles Kleefeld, Richard Krech, Bruce Laxalt, David Leightty, John Levy, Greg McBride, James McKenna, Betsy McKenzie, Joyce Meyers, Jesse Mountjoy, Tim Nolan, Simon Perchik, Carl Reisman, Charles Reynard, Steven M. Richman, Lee Robinson, Kristen Roedell, Barbara B. Rollins, Lawrence Russ, Michael Sowder, Ann Tweedy, Charles Williams, Kathleen Winte, and Warren Wolfson.

Presents poems which explore the metaphysical and the ordinary, including "New Heaven, New Earth" in which a person attempts to find a path through dense woods during a blinding blizzard

Written over a period of two decades, The Law of Poetry contains poems that pay personal tributes to 'things' - broccoli, ducks and concrete - as well as poems that seek to physically enter the realm of abstract concepts - chance, kindness and explanations. Set out in alphabetical order - as if a dictionary of essences - each poem is titled 'The Law of Something', be that 'The Law of Absolutes', 'The Law of the Child, Lost' or 'The Law of Rubber Gloves'. The reader is asked not to judge - as law stereotypically demands - but to engage with this very idiosyncratic world of the individual poet and to be injected, like the shrunken travellers in the 1966 classic, Fantastic Voyage, into the nervous system of another. "The Law of Poetry achieves a near perfect expression of freedom in poems that mix a dazzling intuition with a subtle conusance of the ambivalence of legality. Here, uniquely, law evaporates into ideas." - Peter Goodrich, Professor of Law & Director of Law and Humanities, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, New York. MTC Cronin has published twenty books (poetry, prose poems and essays), several of which have appeared in translation including her 2001 book, Talking to Neruda's Questions. Cronin has studied arts, law and literature and worked for many years in the field of legal research. The Law of Poetry, alongside an earlier work, Squeezing Desire Through a Sieve Micro-essays on Judgement & Justice, reflects a personal history of coming to poetry through the law.

In this study - the fruit of a lifelong critical and imaginative engagement with W H. Auden's works - Anthony Hecht identifies and traces consistent habits of thought and belief within the poet's extensive and varied writings and through his celebrated conversions and repudiations, literary and otherwise. Hecht acknowledges that Auden's poems "both invite the intrusive scrutiny of the cryptographer and deny him access". Yet the readings he offers of poems from every phase of Auden's career, along with dramatic works and critical essays, manage to explicate and illuminate Auden's rich (and often cryptic) allusiveness without murdering to dissect. Among the themes that connect Auden's works are his deep interest in the workings of language; his notion of the ultimate frivolity of art; his interest in the nature of heroism; his understanding of the relation of public to private life; the development of his religious thought; and what Auden called the "hidden law" that governs human existence - a strict and retaliatory force, something like poetic justice, that gives form to our best literature and shapes our personal fates. Hecht identifies these preoccupations in Auden's work - and shows how they cut across the many genres in which he wrote - without losing sight of each poem's individual history and context. As one of Auden's most distinguished poetic heirs, Anthony Hecht is uniquely qualified to illuminate both the reading and the writing of these essential works of twentieth-century literature.

Wallace Stevens was not only one of America's outstanding modernist poets but also a successful insurance lawyer--a fact that continues to intrigue many readers. Though Stevens tried hard to separate his poetry from his profession, legal theorist Thomas Grey shows that he did not ultimately succeed. After stressing how little connection appears on the surface between the two parts of Stevens's life, Grey argues that in its pragmatic account of human reasoning, the poetry distinctively illuminates the workings of the law. In this important extension of the recent law-and-literature movement, Grey reveals Stevens as a philosophical poet and implicitly a pragmatist legal theorist, who illustrates how human thought proceeds through "assertion, qualification, and qualified reassertion," and how reason and passion fuse together in the act of interpretation. Above all, Stevens's poetry proves a liberating antidote to the binary logic that is characteristic of legal theory: one side of a case is right, the other wrong; conduct is either lawful or unlawful. At the same time as he discovers in Stevens a pragmatist philosopher of law, Grey offers a strikingly new perspective on the poetry itself. In the poems that develop Stevens's "reality-imagination complex"--poems often criticized as remote, apolitical, and hermetic--Grey finds a body of work that not only captivates the reader but also provides a unique instrument for scrutinizing the thought processes of lawyers and judges in their exercise of social power.