Prose In The Age Of Poets

The Age of the Poets revisits the age-old problem of the relation between literature and philosophy, arguing against both Plato and Heidegger’s famous arguments. Philosophy neither has to ban the poets from the republic nor abdicate its own powers to the sole benefit of poetry or art. Instead, it must declare the end of what Badiou names the “age of the poets,” which stretches from Hölderlin to Celan. Drawing on ideas from his first publication on the subject, “The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process,” Badiou offers an illuminating set of readings of contemporary French prose writers, giving us fascinating insights into the theory of the novel while also accounting for the specific position of literature between science and ideology.

In Prose in the Age of Poets, Annette Wheeler Cafarelli demonstrates that nonfictional narrative of the time was a central expression of British Romanticism. The rise of interest in the individual traditionally associated with Romantic autobiography was actually part of a wider cultural interest in biography—especially literary biography. Following Johnson's lead in the Lives of the Poets, virtually every major writer of the period experimented with sequences of short, anecdotal lives that became a characteristic Romantic vehicle for discussing theories of creativity, canon, and the place of the poet in society. The Romantics took in new directions the examination of the relation of artists' lives and works, biographers and their subjects, and texts and their readers. Romantic biography, Cafarelli contends, offers a perspective from which to reconsider conventional boundaries of genre, periodization, and the movement from Neoclassicism to Romanticism. In examining the Romantics as prose writers and biographers, Cafarelli explores the affiliations between Romantic theories of reading and writing and twentieth-century critical methodologies. She situates the biographical writings of the major poets, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron, in the context of detailed analyses of biographies by Johnson, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Scott, Southey, and other lesser-known contemporaries. Prose in the Age of Poets will interest scholars and students of Romanticism, Johnson, biography and autobiography, and narrative theory.

This book is the first collection of essays on the British prose poem. With essays by leading academics, critics and practitioners, the book traces the British prose poem’s unsettled history and reception in the UK as well as its recent popularity. The essays cover the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries exploring why this form is particularly suited to the modern age and yet can still be problematic for publishers, booksellers and scholars. Refreshing perspectives are given on the Romantics, Modernists and Post-Modernists, among them Woolf, Beckett and Eliot as well as more recent poets like Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Claudia Rankine, Jeremy Over and Vahni Capildeo. British Prose Poetry moves from a contextual overview of the genre’s early volatile and fluctuating status, through to crucial examples of prose poetry written by established Modernist, surrealist and contemporary writers. Key questions around boundaries are discussed more generally in terms of race, class and gender. The British prose poem’s international heritage, influences and influence are explored throughout as an intrinsic part of its current renaissance.

The guiding theme of these essays is the fate of the imagination and the condition of art in the modern world, where both appear to be enfeebled by scientific hubris, undermined by psychological self-questioning and compromised by political disaster. Erich Heller traces this predicament with subtlety and profundity, from Hegel's and Nietzsche's diagnoses to the various truces and manoeuvres through which remarkable victories have nonetheless been achieved - such as the comic triumphs of Wilhelm Busch. As elsewhere in Professor Heller's work, Thomas Mann's attempt to outwit and redeem his circumstances through art - 'despite' them, as he said himself - occupies a central place. Three of the present essays are devoted to him. Others consider Kleist, Fontane, Hamsun, Karl Kraus and the crucial figures of Hölderlin (who plays such a central role in Heidegger's later philosophical writings) and Rilke. Written with feeling, and the distinctive elegance and wit that have characterized all of Professor Heller's work, the essays here reaffirm the vital interdependence of literature and human values.

The role of the poet, Mary Kinzie writes, is to engage the most profound subjects with the utmost in expressive clarity. The role of the critic is to follow the poet, word for word, into the arena where the creative struggle occurs. How this mutual purpose is served, ideally and practically, is the subject of this bracingly polemical collection of essays. A distinguished poet and critic, Kinzie assesses poetry's situation during the past twenty-five years. Ours, she contends, is literally a prosaic age, not only in the popularity of prose genres but in the resultant compromises with truth and elegance in literature. In essays on "the rhapsodic fallacy," confessionalism, and the romance of perceptual response, Kinzie diagnoses some of the trends that diminish the poet's flexibility. Conversely, she also considers individual poets—Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Howard Nemerov, Seamus Heaney, and John Ashbery—who have found ingenious ways of averting the risks of prosaism and preserving the special character of poetry. Focusing on poet Louise Bogan and novelist J. M. Coetzee, Kinzie identifies a crucial and curative overlap between the practices of great prose-writing and great poetry. In conclusion, she suggests a new approach for teaching writers of poetry and fiction. Forcefully argued, these essays will be widely read and debated among critics and poets alike.

An original thinker in prose as well as verse, Wordsworth wrote extensively about the social, political and literary issues of his time.

I think creativity is the key to the fountain of youth. Gems of Wisdom reflects the creative genius, and wisdom that comes with age. This anthology is a marvelous, brave book, a testimonial to the power of age, and to the spirit. The prose pieces in this book bring the reader into the dreams, hopes and insights of those who embrace age. As we live in an anti-age society, this anthology is important, as it represents the age pride and the importance of the creative process. This is a masterpiece! And everyone at every age should read this book. ---San Francisco Author of The Viagra Diaries and Founder/Age March We would like to acknowledge all of the offerings submitted for this publication. Though we could not include all pieces submitted, we the judges and editors were enchanted by the many memories and stories that we were privileged to share.. ---Kimberly Kinser - Poet, Writer, Amherst Artist and Writers Workshop Leader The anthology by AgeSong abounds with playful poems of times well lived! It's a fine thing to read the poem stories that sing of love songs, along with hardship from people who are now in their seventies and eighties, even nineties. The humor will delight you. You may wonder what you'll be saying at that age! ---Janell Moon, Poet Laureate of Emeryville for 2011-2012, Author of Salt and Paper: 65 Candles