Poetry and the fate of the senses
What is the role of the senses in the creation and reception of poetry? How does poetry carry on the long tradition of making experience and suffering understood by other? With Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart traces the path of the aesthetic in search of an explanation for the role of poetry in culture. Herself an acclaimed poet, Stewart not only brings the intelligence of a critic to the question of poetry, but the insight of a practitioner as well. Her new study includes close discussions of poems by Stevens, Hopkins, Keats, Hardy, Bishop, and Traherne, of the sense of vertigo in Baroque and Romantic works, and of the rich tradition of nocturnes in visual, musical, and verbal art. Ultimately, she argues that poetry can counter the denigration of the senses in contemporary life and can expand our imagination of the range of human expression. -- Back cover
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xi, 447 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780226774138, 9780226774145, 0226774139, 0226774147
47948632
Ch. 1. In the Darkness. I. The Privations of Night and the Origins of Poiesis. II. Laughter, Weeping, and the Order of the Senses. III. The Lyric Eidos
Ch. 2. Sound. I. Dynamics of Poetic Sound. II. Hopkins: Invocation and Listening
Ch. 3. Voice and Possession. I. The Beloved's Voice. II. Three Cases of Lyric Possession
Ch. 4. Facing, Touch, and Vertigo. I. The Experience of Beholding. II. Touch in Aesthetic Forms. III. Vertigo: The Legacy of Baroque Ecstasy
Ch. 5. The Forms and Numbers of Time. I. The Deictic Now. II. Traces of Human Motion: The Ubi Sunt Tradition. III. Meditation and Number: Traherne's Centuries. IV. The Problem of Poetic History
Ch. 6. Out of the Darkness: Nocturnes. I. Finch's Transformation of the Night Work. II. The Emergence of a Nocturne Tradition
Ch. 7. Lyric counter Epic. I. War and the Alienation of the Senses. II. Two Lyric Critiques of Epic: Brooks and Walcott
Afterborn