Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form

Hollander, John

Reference

Oxford University Press

A fully-annotated, two-volume work which presents the major literary achievements of English writers from the medieval period to the twentieth century

The Oxford Anthology of English Literature

Literature & Fiction

Kermode, Frank

World Literature

John Hollander, poet and scholar, was a master whose work joined luminous learning and imaginative risk. This book, based on the unpublished Clark Lectures Hollander delivered in 1999 at Cambridge University, witnesses his power to shift the horizons of our thinking, as he traces the history of shadow in British and American poetry from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century. Shadow shows itself here in myriad literary identities, revealing its force as a way of seeing and a form of knowing, as material for fable and parable. Taking up a vast range of texts—from the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton to Poe, Dickinson, Eliot, and Stevens—Hollander describes how metaphors of shadow influence our ideas of dreaming, desire, doubt, and death. These shadows of poetry and prose fiction point to unknown, often fearful domains of human experience, showing us concealed shapes of truth and possibility. Crucially, Hollander explores how shadows in poetic history become things with a strange substance and life of their own: they acquire the power to console, haunt, stalk, wander, threaten, command, and destroy. Shadow speaks, even sings, revealing to us the lost as much as the hidden self. An extraordinary blend of literary analysis and speculative thought, Hollander’s account of the substance of shadow lays bare the substance of poetry itself.

The Substance of Shadow: A Darkening Trope in Poetic History

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

New and classic essays by one of America's most distinguished contemporary poet-critics, The Work of Poetry surveys an extraordinary range of poets, from Dante to May Swenson, and George Meredith to Marianne Moore, as well as works from the Psalms to A Child's Garden of Verses. By turns generous and uncompromising, Hollander champions the enduring force of poetry against the incursion of fashionable writing. This is an elegant, uncompromising affirmation of the extraordinary powers of poetic imagination from a poet whose poems have been hailed by J.D. McClatchy as "ways of thinking on paper."

The Work of Poetry

Columbia University Press

New and classic essays by one of America's most distinguished contemporary poet-critics, The Work of Poetry surveys an extraordinary range of poets, from Dante to May Swenson, and George Meredith to Marianne Moore, as well as works from the Psalms to A Child's Garden of Verses. By turns generous and uncompromising, Hollander champions the enduring force of poetry against the incursion of fashionable writing. This is an elegant, uncompromising affirmation of the extraordinary powers of poetic imagination from a poet whose poems have been hailed by J.D. McClatchy as "ways of thinking on paper."

Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse

In his classic text Rhyme's Reason the distinguished poet and critic John Hollander surveys the schemes, patterns, and forms of English verse, illustrating each variation with an original and witty self-descriptive example. In this substantially expanded and revised edition, Hollander adds a section of examples taken from centuries of poetry that exhibit the patterns he has described.

Rhyme's reason: A guide to English verse

Poetry

Yale University Press

Poems by the author complement a guide to writing English verse, surveying the forms and patterns of Old English and looking at an assortment of contemporary styles of free verse

Yale Univ Pr

Hollander's a formalist inchworm with an extraordinary sensitivity to the calibrations of style. These essays, written over the last twenty years, hang together as a poetics of English verse from Chaucer to W. C. Williams, with homage paid to poet-composer-theoretician Campion, to Donne for a metrical roughness which shifts meaning through those jagged rhythms, to Milton for his innovative ""variety of pauses"" and especially to Jonson, seen here as a proto-Augustan, in a very loving appreciation of his technical mastery. Hollander's units of measure include enjambment and quantity as well as rhyme and meter; and though there's attention to the poem as inscription he mostly treats verse as an aural experience. This is Emily Dickinson: ""Using a base of the so-called 'common meter' of hymnody--the accentual version in 4-beat and 3-beat alternating lines of the tetrameter-trimeter abcb rhyming quatrain also loosely called 'ballad stanza'--she derived an intense, chromatic, often deliberately soured, solo hymnody of her own."" While mindful of the 20th century movement toward personal meter and eclecticism, Hollander is a joyful taxonomist. Curled comfortably around the roots of Classical and English prosody, he's almost nostalgic for the pristine structures of an earlier order.

Demonstrating a poet’s imaginative ear and a critic’s range of concern, John Hollander here writes about the "melodious guile" with which poetry speaks to us. Through analysis of formal and rhetorical patterns in examples chosen from the whole spectrum of English and American poetry, Hollander describes how poems form self-reflexive parable in order to represent realms beyond themselves. "As astute a book about poetry as anyone has produced in the last five years."―David Lehman, Newsday "A lively and enlivening work of criticism."―Library Journal "Hollander, himself a fine poet, is such a generalist; and Melodious Guile, to my mind the best of his critical books, takes its place . . . among the very few enjoyable and enriching studies of how poetry works."―Alastair Fowler, London Review of Books "An incisive display of beautifully integrated erudition. John Hollander demonstrates, just as post-structuralism is waning, that there are other, more cogent theoretical terms for thinking about poetry and for a return to the reading of poetry."―Robert Alter, University of California, Berkeley Nominated for a 1988 National Book Circle Award in Criticism

Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language

This book is a collection of pattern poems - poems whose printed format presents a picture of some familiar object that is also the subject of the text. Patterned poems, also called shaped verse, are part of a long tradition that extends from Alexandrian Greek poets to Lewis Carroll and beyond. The poems in this book, written by the poet John Hollander, are on subjects ranging from a beach umbrella and a popsicle to time, love and idea. First published in 1969, the book has now been expanded to include ten recent poems in addition to the original 25, plus an introduction in which Hollander reflects on what a shaped poem is and how and why he wrote them. There are also explanatory comments for each poem.

Types of Shape, New, Expanded Edition

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Books by Hollander, John

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hollander, John. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form

The Oxford Anthology of English Literature

The Substance of Shadow: A Darkening Trope in Poetic History

The Work of Poetry

The Work of Poetry

Rhyme's reason: A guide to English verse

Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse

Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form

Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language

Types of Shape, New, Expanded Edition