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The Hatred of Poetry

By: Publication details: England; Fitzcarraldo Editions; 2017Edition: 3rd edDescription: 115 Pages; PaperbackISBN:
  • 9781910695159
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 808.1
Summary: No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes,"than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore. "In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communalexistence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocationno less essential for being impossible.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Book Adult and Young Adult 15-17 Karachi Poetry and Drama 808.1 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Available PKLC023522
Book Adult and Young Adult 15-17 Lahore Poetry and Drama 808.1 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Available PKLC021940
Total holds: 0

No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes,"than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore. "In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communalexistence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocationno less essential for being impossible.

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