A Difficult Grace: On Poets, Poetry, and WritingUniversity of Georgia Press, 2000 - 184 pages “[In] preliterate societies, even those as late as ancient Greece and Anglo-Saxon England, the poet is the ideologue, historian, theologian, philosopher, TV, newspaper, Internet, and megamultiplex cinema rolled into one”--so begins Michael Ryan’s lively description of the cultural context of ancient poetry, in pointed contrast to that of poetry now. Informed by his own experience as a poet and writer,A Difficult Graceexamines the lives and works of Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Whitman, Frost, Bishop, and Stevens (as well as other poets and writers before and since), deftly combining literary history, critical writing by the writers themselves, and Ryan's expert understanding of their work. The result is a collection of powerfully argued essays written in a style easily accessible to a wide range of readers. Attending to the difficult graces of form, structure, rhythm, and technique, Ryan illuminates the unifying subject of his book: the vocation of the poet and the writer in the contemporary world. This is an essential book for both writers and readers. |
Contents
A Note on Form | 35 |
Mister Stevens | 50 |
Disclosures of Poetry | 57 |
A Dark Gray Flame | 75 |
Flaubert in Florida | 90 |
Between Scylla and Charybdis | 107 |
Consider a Move | 125 |
Tell Me a Story | 138 |
Authenticity and Authority | 148 |
Vocation According to Dickinson | 159 |
Acknowledgments | 179 |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic artist audience autobiography becomes believed Bishop's called certainly character Chekhov criticism culture death Delmore Schwartz Donald Justice dramatic dream edition effect Eliot Ellen Bryant Voigt embody Emily Dickinson emotion essays etry experience feel free verse Frost Henry James Higginson human iambic trimeter Idea of Order imagination Justice Justice's poems Key West knew Kunitz language least Leaves of Grass less letters literary live look meaning memory mind moral never object objective correlative Order at Key passion pattern phrase pleasure poem poem's poet poet's poetic poetry Pound prose Ramon Fernandez reader rhetoric rhyme rhythm Romantic says seems sense sentence social role society sound speaker spirit Stanley Kunitz stanza Stevens Stevens's story structure style Suicides survive syntax tell thing tion tradition vocation voice Wallace Stevens Waste Land Whitman whole words Wordsworth writing wrote Yeats