Interviewer’s Note: Born in 1950, William Logan is a professor of English at the University of Florida, where he teaches in the MFA program. He is the author of nine volumes of poetry and five books of criticism, including The Undiscovered Country, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.… continue reading...
This is the 10th installment in the “Role of the Poet-Critic” series, which includes interviews with Dana Gioia, William Logan, Adam Kirsch, Stephen Burt, Christian Wiman, Timothy Steele, William Jay Smith, and Rachel Hadas.… continue reading...
This is the ninth installment in the “Role of the Poet-Critic” series, which includes interviews with Dana Gioia, William Logan, Adam Kirsch, Stephen Burt, Christian Wiman, Timothy Steele, William Jay Smith, and Rachel Hadas.… continue reading...
An excerpt from “The Last of the Dandies”
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1862
Article unsigned
“Who is Captain Gronow?”
He is the last of the “Dandies” of the Regency of George IV.;… continue reading...
Of all the modern poets of France who claimed noble birth—and many did so, by inserting de before their last name as a literary and social affectation—only two indisputably had that right: Villiers de L’isle-Adam and Robert de Montesquiou.… continue reading...
A section of “Beau Brummell” from Miscellaneous Works Volume I: Habits and Men by John Doran (1857)
… continue reading...I scorn to crowd among the muddy throng
Of the rank multitude, whose thicken’d breath
(Like to condensed fogs) do choke the beauty
Which else would dwell in every kingdom’s cheek.
We look upon Beau Brummell as the greatest of small wits. Indeed, he may in this respect be considered, as Cowley says of Pindar as “a species alone,” and as forming a class by himself.… continue reading...
“Beau Brummell” from Eccentric Personages by W. Russell (1864)
It is a solemn truth that every death-bed is the final scene of a great tragedy, though the death be a beggar’s, the bed one of straw.… continue reading...
An Excerpt from Pelham: Or the Adventures of a Gentleman by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1828)
1.) Do not require your dress so much to fit, as to adorn you.… continue reading...
It is not until the reign of that frustrated artist and unsurpassed egotist, Nero, that we again recognize the true dandy, so insolent in repose, embodied in the fragmentary figure of Gaius Petronius (Arbiter).… continue reading...
The first literary dandy of whom we still have record was Plato—who was unquestionably the greatest “exquisite” of his day. This will strike most modern readers as astonishing or inconceivable but it is neither for those who know their Greek.… continue reading...
When was man first freed from the drudgery of earning his income? And who was the first to dedicate himself to the art of living well?… continue reading...
Reviewed: Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. 1st edition, 1938. 2nd edition, 1950. 3rd edition, 1960. 4th edition, 1976.
What was the most important literature textbook of the 20th century?… continue reading...
Editor’s Note
The Contemporary Poetry Review is pleased to publish selected letters to the magazine, some of which have been edited for content and clarity. The editor can be contacted here.… continue reading...
Interviewer’s Note: Born in New York City, Rachel Hadas was educated at Radcliffe College (Classics), The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins (poetry), and Princeton (Comparative Literature), as well as by living on a Greek island for several years in the early 1970’s. … continue reading...
William Jay Smith is the author of more than sixty books of poetry, children’s verse, literary criticism, memoirs, translations, and editor of several influential anthologies. From 1968 to 1970 he served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a post now called the Poet Laureate) and two of his twelve collections of poetry were finalists for the National Book Award. … continue reading...
Book of the Year: Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson (Modern Library).
This one is unavoidable. You can’t get around it. You have to go through it.… continue reading...
Book of the Year: Not for Specialists: New & Selected Poems by W. D. Snodgrass (BOA Editions).
What happened to Snodgrass? After winning the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for his first book, the “confessional school” landmark Heart’s Needle, his career stalled.… continue reading...
Book of the Year: The Collected Poems (1943-2004) of Richard Wilbur (Harcourt)
Runners-Up: Safest by Michael Donaghy (Picador)
Who is the greatest living American poet?… continue reading...
As the assistant literary editor of The New Republic, and later as the book critic for the New York Sun, the poet-critic Adam Kirsch has written a constant stream of articles on contemporary poetry as influential as any in recent years.… continue reading...
Interviewer’s Note: Born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1948, Timothy Steele is the author of several collections of poems: Uncertainties and Rest (Louisiana State University Press, 1979), Sapphics against Anger and Other Poems (Random House, 1986), and The Color Wheel (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).… continue reading...
(The first in a series on obscure authors and their work.)
As Reviewed By: Garrick Davis
The Count Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam was born in 1838, and it is not extravagant to assert that his destiny was determined by his birth.… continue reading...
A few years ago, for the brief span of a few classes, I attended a poetry workshop class at Boston University. Though I was not formally enrolled in the class, the teacher had generously invited me to attend-and since the teacher was one of the great living masters of the art I accepted, though it necessitated my commuting between California and Massachusetts for several months.… continue reading...
Book of the Year: The Collected Poems of Donald Justice (Knopf)
Runner-Up: Second Space by Czeslaw Milosz (Ecco). Inner Voices: Selected Poems by Richard Howard (FSG).… continue reading...
Conducted by: Garrick Davis
Interviewer’s Note: This year, a new website was launched in the National Poetry Month of April-not to publish poetry or fiction, but to examine the ethics of the poetry world.… continue reading...
Reviewed: The Cantos by Ezra Pound (Fourth Collected edition). Faber and Faber, 1987.
A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound by Carroll F. Terrell. University of California Press, 1980.… continue reading...
Book of the Year: The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (FSG)
Runners-Up: The Collected Poems of Ted Hughes, edited by Paul Keegan (FSG); “I Am”: The Selected Poetry of John Clare, edited by Jonathan Bate (FSG)
The story of the year was summed up in two words: Robert Lowell.… continue reading...
In the world of American poetry, getting a call from Dana Gioia is like getting blessed by the Pope. This spring, I received that benediction when he invited me to West Chester, Pennsylvania, for the 9th Annual Conference on Exploring Form & Narrative in Poetry. … continue reading...
On the Relation of His Criticism to His Poetry
As Reviewed By: Garrick Davis
There are two Eliots, the poet and the critic, which bear a curious relation to one another.… continue reading...
Reviewed:
The Roots of Treason by E. Fuller Torrey. McGraw-Hill, 1984. 339 pp.
The Genealogy of Demons by Robert Casillo. Northwestern University Press, 1988. 463 pp.… continue reading...
Futurism, the great European art movement of the early 20th century, found an audience of one in the industrialized new world, and that was Hart Crane.… continue reading...
Click here to read The Sacred Wood by T. S. Eliot free of charge.
As Reviewed By: Garrick Davis
“I do not believe there has been another age in which so much extraordinarily good criticism of poetry has been written.”… continue reading...
Interviewer’s Note: Born in Los Angeles in 1950, Dana Gioia attended Stanford University and did graduate work at Harvard where he studied with Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Fitzgerald.… continue reading...
Stephen Burt grew up in Washington, D.C., graduated from Harvard College in 1994, and did graduate work at Oxford and then at Yale. He teaches at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota.… continue reading...
Interviewer’s Note: Adam Kirsch was born in Los Angeles in 1976. After studying English at Harvard, with a focus on poetry, he went to work at The New Republic as assistant literary editor.… continue reading...
The artistic movement which Filippo Tommaso Marinetti launched on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909 with his famous manifesto, which Guillaume Apollinaire would soon call le nouveau esprit, and which quickly spread throughout continental Europe as the last great art fashion, Il Futurismo, never took root in England or America.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Madonna anno domini by Joshua Clover. Louisiana State University Press, 1997.
It is often important to understand why an audience acquires certain books, especially when this unmasks a shallowness on our part, or a susceptibility to the slick iconography of marketing departments.… continue reading...
We live in an age awash with bad books. This fact, though that statistical non-entity the average reader may be unaware of it, constitutes the greatest crisis facing literature at the end of this century.… continue reading...
