Metrical Claims And Poetic Experience

This volume contributes to the fields of lyric poetry and poetics (especially poetic form), aesthetics, and German literature by intervening in debates on the social functions, cognitive and emotional effects, and the value of poetry. It builds on, and moves beyond, previous theories of rhythm to tie meter more particularly to the specificities of poetic language in blending of embodied responses, cultural situations, and linguistic particularities. The book examines the German-language tradition across three centuries, arguing that the interdisciplinarity and richness of metrical theory and practice emerge in the heterogeneity of poetry and its defenders in their specific historical moments. Focusing on Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Durs Grünbein, the book contextualizes each in the metrical and aesthetic debates of his epoch, showing how questions of meter are linked with overarching poetic goals such as the relationship between form and meaning, the adaptation of the Classical past for German literature, and the ways poetry's sounds work in the body. It argues that Klopstock's, Nietzsche's, and Grünbein's metrical theory and practice offer valuable insights for thinking about the ways poetry works and why it matters.

This volume contributes to the fields of lyric poetry and poetics (especially poetic form), aesthetics, and German literature by intervening in debates on the social functions, cognitive and emotional effects, and the value of poetry. It builds on, and moves beyond, previous theories of rhythm to tie meter more particularly to the specificities of poetic language in blending of embodied responses, cultural situations, and linguistic particularities. The book examines the German-language tradition across three centuries, arguing that the interdisciplinarity and richness of metrical theory and practice emerge in the heterogeneity of poetry and its defenders in their specific historical moments. Focusing on Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Durs Grünbein, the book contextualizes each in the metrical and aesthetic debates of his epoch, showing how questions of meter are linked with overarching poetic goals such as the relationship between form and meaning, the adaptation of the Classical past for German literature, and the ways poetry's sounds work in the body. It argues that Klopstock's, Nietzsche's, and Grünbein's metrical theory and practice offer valuable insights for thinking about the ways poetry works and why it matters.

"This study finds that in scanning poetry, the commitment to the "foot" as a unit of measure satisfies a desire for a poem to display a "system." But that system is achieved only at the cost of distorting or obscuring the true stress configuration of verse lines. The foot also comes into play in setting up the notion of an ideal line, supposedly heard by the "mind's ear," and said to be in "tension" or "counterpoint" with the actual line. Rethinking Meter discards this approach as removing us from our authentic experience of a poem's movement." "Before presenting its own view of meter, the book takes up the issues of how the words of a poem are to be enunciated, the place of pauses, and the notion of the line as the essential formal feature marking off poetry from prose. Focusing on iambic pentameter, Rethinking Meter proceeds to offer a view of metrical patterns that discards the foot entirely."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The long-awaited second collection by a central literary figure, Columbia University professor, and poetry editor of the Boston Review.

In a wide-ranging and compelling account of the life of metrical and free verse in the twentieth century, poet and critic Jon Silkin deepens our understanding of the way poetry works on us. He begins from the premiss that two modes of verse, free and metrical, engage the creative energies of poetry now, creating a rich, fertile environment capable of yielding work valuable to poetry itself and to the society which has given it life. With a practitioner's empathy Silkin reads the poetry of Whitman, Hopkins, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Bunting and eight British poets from the post-second World War period to illustrate how free and metrical verse create, separately or together, a poetic harmony. Additionally, he includes crucial statements on modern poetry from poets themselves, concluding with a fine memoir of Basil Bunting by Connie Pickard, published in book-form for the first time.

Poetic Effects: A Relevance Theory Perspective offers a pragmatic account of the effects achieved by the poetic use of rhetorical tropes and schemes. It contributes to the pragmatics of poetic style by developing work on stylistic effects in relevance theory. It also contributes to literary studies by proposing a new theoretical account of literariness in terms of mental representations and mental processes. The book attempts to define literariness in terms of text-internal linguistic properties, cultural codes or special purpose reading strategies, as well as suggestions that the notion of literariness should be dissolved or rejected. It challenges the accounts of language and verbal communication that underpin such positions and outlines the theory of verbal communication developed within relevance theory that supports an explanatory account of poetic effects and a new account of literariness. This is followed by a broader discussion of philosophical and psychological issues having a bearing on the question of what is expressed non-propositionally in literary communication. The discussion of emotion, qualitative experience and, more specifically, aesthetic experience provides a fuller characterisation of poetic effects and ‘poetic thought’.

Wordsworth's verse and compelling criticism have shaped our understanding of poetic art since the Romantic period. This collection is the first in years to reexamine Wordsworth's complex theory of poetry in depth. Designed to be equally useful and inspiring, it provides much-needed reassessments of a vital juncture of Romantic creativity.

An account of the performance of poetry from late Antiquity to the Renaissance that explores the role and importance of poetry in western culture.