The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre.—Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "The Poet"
"[The poet] is a seer.... he is individual... he is complete in himself.... the others are as good as he, only he sees it and they do not. He is not one of the chorus. "—Walt Whitman, from the preface to Leaves of Grass
Poetry has always given rise to interpretation, judgment, and controversy. Indeed, the history of poetry criticism is as rich and varied a journey as the history of poetry itself. But classic writings such as Emerson's essay "The Poet" and Whitman's preface to Leaves of Grass serve as more than a critical "call and response": the works are striking examples of how the finest poets themselves have written on poetics and the works of their peers and predecessors—revealing, in the process, much about the theory and passion behind their own works.
Spanning thousands of years and including thirty-three of the most influential critical essays ever written, Classic Writings on Poetry is the first major anthology of criticism devoted exclusively to poetry. Beginning with a survey of the history of poetics and providing an introduction and brief biography for each reading, esteemed poet and critic William Harmon takes readers from Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Poetics to the Norse mythology of Snorri Sturluson's Skáldskaparmál. John Dryden's An Essay of Dramatic Poesy and Shelley's A Defence of Poetry are included, as is an excerpt from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse novel Aurora Leigh, arriving, finally, at the modernist sensibility of "Poetic Reality and Critical Unreality," by Laura (Riding) Jackson. For anyone interested in the art and artifice of poetry, Classic Writings on Poetry is a journey well worth taking.
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1. The Republic (excerpt), by Plato
- 2. Poetics, by Aristotle
- 3. Ars Poetica, by Horace
- 4. Germania (excerpt), by Publius Cornelius Tacitus
- 5. "On the Sublime" (excerpt), by Longinus(?)
- 6. Skáldskaparmál, by Snorri Sturluson
- 7. The Defence of Poesy, by Sir Philip Sidney
- 8. "Of Education" (excerpt), by John Milton
- 10. An Essay on Criticism, by Alexander Pope
- Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, by Alexander Pope
- 11. Lives of the Poets (excerpts), by Samuel Johnson
- 12. The Progress of Poesy, by Thomas Gray
- 13. Observations Prefixed to Lyrical Ballads, by William Wordsworth
- 14. Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- 15. The State of Modern Poetry (excerpt), by Francis Jeffrey
- 16. On Poetry in General (excerpt), by William Hazlitt
- 17. The Four Ages of Poetry (excerpt), by Thomas Love Peacock
- 18. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (excerpt), by George Gordon, Lord Byron
- 19. A Defence of Poetry, by Percy Bysshe Shelley
- 20. The Poet, by William Cullen Bryant
- 21. Poems, by John Keats
- 22. The Poet (excerpt), by Ralph Waldo Emerson
- 23. Aurora Leigh, Fifth Book (excerpt), by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- 24. Poems, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- 25. The Philosophy of Composition, by Edgar Allan Poe
- 26. Preface to Leaves of Grass, first edition (1855, excerpt), by Walt Whitman
- 27. The Study of Poetry, by Matthew Arnold
- 28. Poems, by Emily Dickinson
- 29. "Proofs of Holy Writ", by Rudyard Kipling
- 30. A Retrospect, by Ezra Pound
- 31. The Possibility of a Poetic Drama, by T. S. Eliot
- 32. Poetic Reality and Critical Unreality, by Laura (Riding) Jackson
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