The Work of Poetry

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Columbia University Press, 1997 - 318 pages
New and classic essays by one of America's most distinguished contemporary poet-critics, The Work of Poetry surveys an extraordinary range of poets, from Dante to May Swenson, and George Meredith to Marianne Moore, as well as works from the Psalms to A Child's Garden of Verses. By turns generous and uncompromising, Hollander champions the enduring force of poetry against the incursion of fashionable writing. This is an elegant, uncompromising affirmation of the extraordinary powers of poetic imagination from a poet whose poems have been hailed by J.D. McClatchy as "ways of thinking on paper."

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Contents

Preface
Seven Hearing and Overhearing the Psalms 113
Eight On A Childs Garden of Verses 129
Ten Discovering Wallace Stevens 152
On Dante Gabriel Rossetti 190
Sixteen Merediths Poetry 215
A Late Appreciation 235
Index 307
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About the author (1997)

John Hollander has edited several Everyman's Library Pocket Poet volumes, including "Robert Frost", "Christmas Poems", "War Poems", "Marriage Poems", "Animal Poems", & "Garden Poems". He is the A. Bartlett Biamatti Professor of English at Yale University, & the author of numerous books of poetry & criticism. He was made a MacArthur Fellow in 1990.

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