Sound and Form in Modern Poetry

Front Cover
University of Michigan Press, 1996 - Literary Criticism - 348 pages
Why are poems important? What do people mean when they use the word prosody? How does a poem read and sound? How does a poem's shape--its form--help to create its meaning? Sound and Form in Modern Poetry provides useful answers to these questions for readers of poetry. Through careful attention to the poems of modern masters, the book offers an accessible guide to the way today's poems really work, and to the way they are linked in style to poems of earlier times.
Poet, critic, and editor Robert McDowell has updated this classic text in the light of the poetic and critical developments of the last three decades. Segments on Dickinson, Robinson, Frost, Jeffers, and Lowell, among other poets, have been greatly expanded, and Ashbery, Creeley, Ginsberg, Hall, Kees, Kumin, Levertov, Levine, O'Hara, Plath, Rich, Simpson, and Wilbur added, among others. The epilogue discusses a new generation of poets whose works will likely be read well into the next century-- among others, Thomas M. Disch, Rita Dove, Dana Gioia, Emily Grosholz, Mark Jarman, Molly Peacock, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Timothy Steele, Mary Swander, and Marilyn Nelson Waniek.
Over the last ten years, the most inspiring topic of conversation and argument among poets and their readers has been the resurgence of narrative and traditional forms. The new Sound and Form in Modern Poetry is a seminal text in this discussion, examining not only this movement but all of the important developments (Dadaism, Surrealism, Imagism, Language Poetry, and the Confessional School) that have defined our poetry in the twentieth century and have set the stage for poetry's continued life in the twenty-first. The original Sound and Form in Modern Poetry enjoyed extensive classroom use as a text; the revised version promises to be even more accessible, and more essential, for years to come.
The late Harvey Gross was Professor of Comparative Literature, State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Robert McDowell is publisher and editor of Story Line Press, and is also poet, critic, translator, fiction writer, and essayist.
 

Contents

Prosody as Rhythmic Cognition
8
The Scansion of the English Meters
22
II Quantitative and Syllabic Meters
29
III Prosodic Analysis
34
Modern Poetry in the Metrical Tradition
38
II William Butler Yeats
44
III Robert Bridges
51
Edwin Arlington Robinson
58
VI The Visual in the Verbal
124
The Celebrated Metric of Ezra Pound
127
T S Eliot and the Music of Poetry
161
Stevens Frost and Jeffers Three Who Stayed Home Hart Crane One Who Found No Home
202
I Wallace Stevens
203
II Robert Frost
217
III Robinson Jeffers
224
IV Hart Crane
230

V Edwin Muir
62
VI Langstan Hughes
67
VII John Crowe Ransom
68
NineteenthCentury Precursors
75
I Robert Browning
76
II Walt Whitman
80
III Emily Dickinson
85
IV Gerard Manley Hopkins
87
V Toward the Twentieth Century
94
Imagism and Visual Prosody
99
II Des Imagistes
102
III Marianne Moore
109
IV William Carlos Williams
115
V e e Cummings
120
Auden and After
238
I W H Auden
239
II Louis MacNeice and Patrick Kavanagh
247
III Dylan Thomas
252
IV Theodore Roethke
258
V Robert Lowell John Benyman Sylvia Plath Weldon Kees Elizabeth Bishop
266
Larkin Wilbur and Company
285
VII Robert Creeley Robert Bly Adrienne Rich Denise Levertov
293
Frank OHara Allen Ginsberg John Ashbery
300
IX Louis Simpson Philip Levine Donald Hall Maxine Kumin
305
Epilogue New Poets
317
Notes
327
Index
335
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