A Little Book on Form
An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An acute and deeply insightful book of essays exploring poetic form and the role of instinct and imagination within form—from former poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Robert Hass.
Robert Hass—former poet laureate, winner of the National Book Award, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize—illuminates the formal impulses that underlie great poetry in this sophisticated, graceful, and accessible volume of essays drawn from a series of lectures he delivered at the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
A Little Book on Form brilliantly synthesizes Hass’s formidable gifts as both a poet and a critic and reflects his profound education in the art of poetry. Starting with the exploration of a single line as the basic gesture of a poem, and moving into an examination of the essential expressive gestures that exist inside forms, Hass goes beyond approaching form as a set of traditional rules that precede composition, and instead offers penetrating insight into the true openness and instinctiveness of formal creation.
A Little Book on Form is a rousing reexamination of our longest lasting mode of literature from one of our greatest living poets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With specificity, clarity, and inspired insight, Hass (Times and Materials), a Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate, painstakingly dissects and analyzes poetic form. Hass's reading is extensive, as shown by references to and quotations of dozens of poets, ranging in period from Caesar's Rome to the Renaissance and 21st-century America. He includes the greats Bash , Dickinson, Rudaki, Shakespeare and a wealth of lesser-known talents. Hass discusses how poetic form synthesizes many subjects, including math, music, religion, and sexuality. Throughout, he justifies and asserts the place of order in poetic form, which is often accused of being chaotic and abstruse. The first fourth of the book alone is dedicated to the significance of line count. He instructs that a single line is whole, in addition to being "light and heavy"; that two lines introduce dependent relation and can be seen as an aspect of one; and that three lines, due to their lack of symmetrical relation, evoke mystery and infinitude. He also includes intriguing etymologies and translations, delineating the evolution of specific words, poems, and poetic forms. Hass has produced an emotionally and intellectually nurturing work of analysis, suited for academia and ambitious leisure readers.
