The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem

Contents
Preface
1. Word Choice
2. Syntax and the Poetic Line
3. Images: Simile and Metaphor
4. Metaphor and the Sonnet
5. The Sonnet
6. Poetic Conventions
7. More Verse Forms
8. Personification
9. Poetic Voice
10. Gender and Poetic Voice
11. Poetic Rhythm: Metric
12. Poetic Rhythm: Sound and Rhyme
13. Rhetoric: More Tropes
14. Incomplete Figures and the Art of Reading
Appendix
Glossary
Bibliographical Backgrounds
Index of Poems
Index of Poets
Index of Terms and Topics

Shira Wolosky, Professor of English and American Literature, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

"The project itself is both coherent and concise, relying on close readings of short, post-medieval poems...to introduce concepts of diction, syntax, metre, and rhyme. At its best, the book shows that clarity of discussion need not sell short depth of analysis, or complexity of awareness, and it is an excellent starting-point for any serious consideration of form in poetry, of what poetry does to language and what language is always ready to do to poetry."--Peter McDonald, Poetry Review"The Art of Poetry is both a superb technical manual and an authentic guide to the art of reading poetry. With brilliance and extraordinary lucidity, Wolosky illuminates such essential matters as metaphor, poetic voice, and the crucial relation of rhetoric to poetic meaning. I cannot imagine a more useful and distinguished book of this kind." --Harold Bloom, Yale University"Wolosky has written the best basic treatment I know of the art of poetry. Wolosky structures the book brilliantly, and makes the process of learning about textual virtuosity and semantic complexity a joy. She builds her explications from the ground up (or from the surface down), always with attention to what it means to make a student get into a poem step by step. I have learned a great deal from this work, though I've been teaching poetry for twenty years. This is a genuinely important book, and I predict it will become in short time a standard text for teaching poetry."--Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University"Here is a generous Art of Poetry for the modern English-speaking world. How tellingly Shira Wolosky moves from matters of taxonomy to those of technique, from the rudiments of poetic form to the resonance of poetic voice and point of view--from praxis to theory and back, from literary history to the experience of the literature itself. For at every step the author supports her claims with readings of individuals poems that are close and adept, eloquent and acute. This book is a welcom