Karl ShapiroRecensioni

This was a treasured book of Ed’s. I had it rebound for him while I was at the Athenaeum.

Modern American & Modern British Poetry, 1955, ed. Louis Untermeyer. I doubt that these poems could still be considered modern, but among them you will find timeless ideas and beauty. I especially like the story poems. Frost’s, The Witch of Coos, and E. A. Robinson’s, Mr. Flood’s Party. Individual lines like; “Mumbo-jumbo will hoo-doo you”, “but the rain is full of ghost’s tonight”, “human kind can not bear very much reality”, “Night or day, what’er befall / I must walk that desert land / Until I dare my fear and call / The lion out to lick my hand.”, “A snake came to my water-trough / On a hot, hot day” are a few of my favorites. Take this book to your local coffee shop and relax.

I teach writing. I have read a lot of books about prosody but this is the one you want if you are interested in a full description of what a poem requires. By that I mean the full soundscape of this particular use of language and aesthetics. Karl Shapiro is the other author and contributed mightily but know this: there isn't any better introduction to the craft that fully rates the different contributions of sound and color and image than this. It is also beautifully written which is not necessarily what one can expect in a book on poetry. I will be using this as a handbook, wearing its pages well

Possibly the best collection of modern poetry in the English language.

Three Essays: What the poet knows, The true artificer, The career of the poem.

Originally published as "Beyond Criticism".

Nice Glossary--useful especially for the many Greek words (retained in study because the English phrases are so long)--but does not include a definition of "Prosody". (!) {The patterns of stress and intonation in a language, usually as presented in a poem}.

Noting that Rossetti takes up the traditiona motif of the lament for a dead lady with a new turn in "The Blessed Damozel". He "determined to reverse the conditions and give utterance to the yearning of the loved one in heaven." [167]
Heaven is treated "with the tentativeness and marmoreal quality that seem appropriate; the lady's delicacy, passionate longing, and odd mixture of ethereality and voluptuousness are vividly rendered." The poem illustrates the various problems in the "sheer mechanics of scansion" [!]:

The sun | was gone | now; the | curled moon
Was like | a lit|tle feath|er
Fluttering | far down | the gulf; | and now
She spoke | through he | still weath|er.
Her voice | was like | the voice | the stars
Had when | they sang | togeth|er.

Contents:

1. Prosody as a Study
2. Poetry and Verse.
3. Syllables: Color, Stress, Quantity, Pitch
4. The Foot
5. The Line
6. Accentual and Syllabic Verse
7. Meter and Rhythm
8. the Uses of Meter
9. Tempo
10. Rhyme
11. The Uses of Rhyme
12. The Stanza
13. Stanza Forms
14. The Sonnet
15. Blank Verse
16. Free Verse
17. Classical Prosody
18. Prosody and Period
19. Scansions and Comments

With Glossary, Bibliography and Index.

Interesting book about prosody. Have to read it in detail, from Margriet Tindemans

This is the best book for learning about the "tools of the trade" in poetry and literary writing. It is amazing what a good author, with a mastery of basic literary tools, can do with the sounds of a language. Really enjoyed.