Poetic Visions

Though it has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize, the poetry of Robert Penn Warren still is not widely or well understood. In this study, Victor H. Strandberg redresses this imbalance by providing a comprehensive survey of the poetic canon of this gifted, complex, and much-neglected poet. Warren writes in the tradition of Western poets concerned with the painful experience of a forced, one-way passage from innocence into "the world's stew" of time and loss. This passage, Strandberg explains, results for Warren in bifurcation of the self into warring segments: a "clean" idealistic surface ego, and a polluted "undiscovered self" in the unconscious. Revelation of the "dirty" part of human personality is tellingly evoked in many of Warren's major works. As the poet's vision expands, however, these conflicting elements are unified in a "mystic osmosis of being" whereby "the world which once provoked... fear and disgust may now be totally loved." In addition to close analysis both of individual poems and of the poet's overall development, Strandberg reviews critical opinion of Warren's poetry over the last three decades and assesses his place among fellow poets. Both as "prophecy" and as "art," he concludes, Robert Penn Warren's poetry is so significant, versatile, and excellent "as to rank him among the finest and most fertile talents of his age."

The attempt, in this selection of poems, has been to place before the readers a few gems of poetic excellence, so that they are both charmed and captivated. This has been done to meet one of the basic requirements of great art, namely pleasure. Care has also been taken to include poems that are not commonly found in most of our present-day poetry selections.

Susan Dean uses Hardy's own metaphor—the diorama of a dream—to interpret The Dynasts, his largest and last major composition. She shows that the poem presents a model of the human mind. In that mind is enacted an event (the war with Napoleon) and, simultaneously, the watching of that event. The author provides a reading of the poem in visual-dramatic terms, using the diorama stage as the vehicle for the poet's field of vision. She then defines various visual dimensions, the relationships between them, and the various ways in which they can be seen and understood. Her interpretation draws on Hardy's autobiography and critical essays. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Rhythm, Illusion and the Poetic Idea explores the concept of rhythm and its central yet problematic role in defining modern French poetry. Forging innovative lines of inquiry linking the detailed analysis of poetic form to the evolution of fundamental aesthetic principles, David Evans offers extensive new readings of the literary and critical writings of the three major poets at the centre of France's most important poetic revolution. The volume is of interest to all students and readers of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, since here is presented for the first time a thorough comparative study of developments in each writer's poetic form and theory, focusing on the themes of illusion, deception and the musical metaphor. The book is also intended to stimulate wider critical debate on the interpretation of metrical verse, prose poetry and vers libre, and offers original analytical methods which facilitate the study of poetic form. The author proposes a radical shift in our understanding of the role and mechanisms of poetic rhythm, suggesting that its very resistance to definition and fixity provides a conveniently opaque veil over the difficulties of defining poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Contained within these pages of this book is a collection of written works that could loosely be called poetry. I have spent my life never following the rules and when it comes to writing, it is no different. Therein you will find everything from haiku to prose poems to limericks to narrative poems, to traditional form poetry with meter and rhyme. You will also find a few quips, sayings, and variations on a new form that I have worked at creating. I wish you a safe trip down this poetic trail that I call my life, dreams, ambitions, and nightmares. I hope you laugh, cry, and are mentally and emotionally satisfied when you close this book.

While the philosophical discussion of Zen spirituality reaches its limit, poetry offers an effective expression of the sublime experiences. From a poetic perspective, enlightenment is understood as poetic leaps in the spiritual journey, which brings people from the habitually or conventionally established world toward new horizons of consciousness. This leap is a breakthrough in the overall consciousness, rather than a progression in contemplative thought. Therefore, it cannot be adequately described through abstract representation, but poetry can metaphorically capture this leap and reveal both the spiritual meaning and the practical wisdom of enlightenment. This book will take you on this fantastic journey of enlightenment.