By Charles Upton
From the times of the 1st shamans, via Homer, Dante, the conventional ballads, Rumi, Blake, Emily Dickinson, and Lew Welch, poetry has been rooted in metaphysics. In What Poets Used to understand, Charles Upton offers poetry either as a suite of contemplative innovations and as a key to the collected lore hoard of the human race.
Read Online or Download What Poets Used to Know: Poetics Mythopoesis Metaphysics PDF
Best criticism & theory books
Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics
Peter Szondi is generally considered as being one of the so much amazing postwar literary critics. this primary English variation of 1 of his so much lucid and engaging sequence of lectures, translated by means of Martha Woodmansee and with a foreword by means of Joel Weinsheimer, opens up his paintings in hermeneutics to English-speaking readers.
Iain Sinclair (Salt Studies in Contemporary Literature & Culture)
This examine represents the 1st accomplished examine of Iain Sinclair's writing, protecting his key texts from the early Seventies as much as London Orbital. It situates Sinclair's paintings with regards to more than a few significant London writers, from Blake and Dickens via to Peter Ackroyd, and gives leading edge readings from a cultural Marxist point of view.
It’s go in horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006
The world over famous as the most leading edge writers in the United States at the present time, Leslie Scalapino again and again demanding situations the bounds of many varieties during which she works—poetry, prose, performs, and extra. This awesome quantity contains paintings from sequential and serial poems written over thirty-two years.
What Poets Used to Know: Poetics Mythopoesis Metaphysics
From the times of the 1st shamans, via Homer, Dante, the normal ballads, Rumi, Blake, Emily Dickinson, and Lew Welch, poetry has been rooted in metaphysics. In What Poets Used to grasp, Charles Upton offers poetry either as a collection of contemplative strategies and as a key to the accrued lore hoard of the human race.
- Masks outrageous and austere: culture, psyche, and persona in modern women poets
- Henry James and the ’Woman Business’
- Proof theory
- Making sense in life and literature
- Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times
Additional resources for What Poets Used to Know: Poetics Mythopoesis Metaphysics
Sample text
In any case, it is the function of the Muse to prevent us from falling into the sort of narcissistic subjectivity that is always the death of poetry; she is there to make sure we aren’t just talking to ourselves. In the traditional ballad of “Thomas Rymer” from the Child collection (“rymer” means “poet”), True Thomas is abducted by the Queen of Faerie—clearly a Pagan British rendition of the poet’s Muse—who conducts him through various chambers of the underworld, and lays upon him the taboo that, while a guest in Her realm, he must speak to Her and no-one else.
But when poetry began to be considered more an art than a craft, the word art degenerated until it came to denote a work produced primarily through inspiration rather than craft competence, an inspiration that the poet could only hope would somehow bring its own crafted verse forms with it, directly out of his or her sensitive poetic soul, through which the “cultural collective unconscious” might, on rare occasions, find a way to speak. ) Poetry was taught as a true craft in the Bardic Academies of Celtic Europe.
Then, penny-eyed, that gentleman of wounds: then, dead and ready for burial, the wounded man Old cock from nowheres and the heaven’s egg: the ancient and self-born penis/that came before the question/about the chicken and the egg/born fatherless like the world/ from the egg of Orpheus With his bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds: standing cold and naked and dead/ in the coat of his flesh / in the winds that blow/ between birth and death Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg: hatched from the wreckage of the storm and its rescue, Scraped at my cradle in a walking word: told to my infant self all the terrors / of the world through which he now must wander That night of time under the Christward shelter: with the darkness of Deus Absconditus filling it, and Christ at the end of it.