Best Poetry Literary Criticism Books
Here you will get Best Poetry Literary Criticism Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Letters to a Young Poet: A New Translation and Commentary
Author: by Rainer Maria Rilke
Shambhala (June 1, 2021)
English
120 pages
A fresh perspective on a beloved classic by acclaimed translators Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s (18751926) Letters to a Young Poet has been treasured by readers for nearly a century. Rilke’s personal reflections on the vocation of writing and the experience of living urge an aspiring poet to look inward, while also offering sage wisdom on further issues including gender, solitude, and romantic love.
Barrows and Macy’s translation extends this compilation of timeless advice and wisdom to a fresh generation of readers. With a new introduction and commentary, this edition places the letters in the context of today’s world and the unique challenges we face when seeking authenticity.
2. The Divine Comedy (The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso)
Author: by Dante Alighieri
Berkley
English
928 pages
The authoritative translations of The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradisotogether in one volume. Belonging in the immortal company of the great works of literature, Dante Alighieri’s poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the infinite torment of Hell, up the arduous slopes of Purgatory, and on to the glorious realm of Paradisethe sphere of universal harmony and eternal salvation.
Now, for the first time, John Ciardi’s brilliant and authoritative translations of Dante’s three soaring canticlesThe Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradisohave been gathered together in a single volume. Crystallizing the power and beauty inherent in the great poet’s immortal conception of the aspiring soul, The Divine Comedy is a dazzling work of sublime truth and mystical intensity.
3. A Poetry Handbook
Author: by Mary Oliver
0156724006
Mariner Books
English
With passion, wit, and good common sense, the celebrated poet Mary Oliver tells of the basic ways a poem is builtmeter and rhyme, form and diction, sound and sense. She talks of iambs and trochees, couplets and sonnets, and how and why this should matter to anyone writing or reading poetry.
Drawing on poems from Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others, Oliver imparts an extraordinary amount of information in a remarkably short space. Mary Oliver would probably never admit to anything so grandiose as an effort to connect the conscious mind and the heart (that’s what she says poetry can do), but that is exactly what she accomplishes in this stunning little handbook.Los Angeles Times
4. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Author: by Simon Armitage
English
208 pages
0393334155
The classic story that inspired the film starring Dev Patel and Alicia VikanderA medieval romancebut also an outlandish ghost story, a gripping morality tale and a weird thriller. I couldn’t put down Simon Armitage’s compulsively readable… Energetic, free-flowing, high-spirited version.
Edward Hirsch, New York Times Book ReviewOne of the founding stories of English literature, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight narrates the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse who rudely interrupts Camelot’s Round Table festivities one Yuletide, casting a pall of unease over the company and challenging one of their number to a wager.
The virtuous Gawain accepts and decapitates the intruder with his own axe. Gushing blood, the knight reclaims his head, orders Gawain to seek him out a year hence, and departs. The following Yuletide, Gawain dutifully sets forth. His quest for the Green Knight involves a winter journey, a seduction scene in a dreamlike castle, a dire challenge answeredand a drama of enigmatic reward disguised as psychic undoing.
5. When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry
Author: by LeAnne Howe
English
496 pages
0393356809
Selected as one of Oprah Winfrey’s “Books That Help Me Through” United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into the first historically comprehensive Native poetry anthology. This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries.
Opening with a blessing from Pulitzer Prizewinner N. Scott Momaday, the book contains powerful introductions from contributing editors who represent the five geographically organized sections. Each section begins with a poem from traditional oral literatures and closes with emerging poets, ranging from Eleazar, a seventeenth-century Native student at Harvard, to Jake Skeets, a young Din poet born in 1991, and including renowned writers such as Luci Tapahanso, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, and Ray Young Bear.
When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through offers the extraordinary sweep of Native literature, without which no study of American poetry is complete.
6. The Poems of Nakahara Chuya
Author: by Nakahara Chuya
English
146 pages
0852442556
Born in 1907 Nakahara Chuya was one of the most gifted and colourful of Japan’s early modern poets. A bohemian romantic, his death at the early age of thirty, coupled with the delicacy of his imagery, have led to him being compared to the greatest of French symbolist poets.
Since the Second World War Nakahara’s stature has risen, and his poetry is now ranked among the finest Japanese verse of the 20th century. Influenced by both Symbolism and Dada, he created lyrics renowned for their songlike eloquence, their personal imagery and their poignant charm.
This selection of poems from throughout Nakahara’s creative life includes collected and uncollected work and draws on recent scholarship to give a full account of this extraordinary figure.
7. We Hope This Reaches You in Time
Author: by r.h. Sin
English
216 pages
1524855766
A revised and expanded paperback edition of We Hope This Reaches You in Time by Samantha King Holmes and r.H. Sin with all-new bonus material from the authors. Ideas, poetry, and prose from bestselling authors Samantha King Holmes & r.H.Sin.
8. William Blake vs the World
Author: by John Higgs
W&N (May 6, 2021)
English
384 pages
“Concise, learned, revisionary… Should enrich the passionate conversation about poetic forms for years to come.” Edward Hirsch, author of How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry Two of our foremost poets provide here a lucid, straightforward primer that “looks squarely at some of the headaches and mysteries of poetic form”: a book for readers who have always felt that an understanding of form (sonnet, ballad, villanelle, sestina, among others) would enhance their appreciation of poetry.
Tracing “the exuberant history of forms,” they devote one chapter to each form, offering explanation, close reading, and a rich selection of examplars that amply demonstrate the power and possibility of that form.
10. How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry (Harvest Book)
Author: by Edward Hirsch
B004KZOWEQ
Mariner Books
March 22, 1999
“Read a poem to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read it while you’re alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone sleeps next to you. Say it over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of culturethe constant buzzing noise that surrounds youhas momentarily stopped.
This poem has come from a great distance to find you.” So begins this astonishing book by one of our leading poets and critics. In an unprecedented exploration of the genre, Hirsch writes about what poetry is, why it matters, and how we can open up our imaginations so that its messagewhich is of vital importance in day-to-day lifecan reach us and make a difference.
For Hirsch, poetry is not just a part of life, it is life, and expresses like no other art our most sublime emotions. In a marvelous reading of world poetry, including verse by such poets as Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, William Wordsworth, Sylvia Plath, Charles Baudelaire, and many more, Hirsch discovers the meaning of their words and ideas and brings their sublime message home into our hearts.
11. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
Author: by Heather Clark
Knopf
English
1152 pages
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography One of the most beautiful biographies I’ve ever read.” Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller, UntamedThe highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art.
With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials-including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews-Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley, Massachusetts who had poetic ambition from a very young age and was an accomplished, published writer of poems and stories even before she became a star English student at Smith College in the early 1950s.
Determined not to read Plath’s work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark evokes a culture in transition, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Plath’s world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother; her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a marriage of true minds that would change the course of poetry in English; and much more.
12. Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them
Author: by Emily Dickinson
English
864 pages
0674737962
Widely considered the definitive edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems, this landmark collection presents her poems here for the first time as she preserved them, and in the order in which she wished them to appear. It is the only edition of Dickinson’s complete poems to distinguish clearly those she took pains to copy carefully onto folded sheets in fair handpresumably to preserve them for posterityfrom the ones she kept in rougher form.
It is also unique among complete editions in presenting the alternate words and phrases Dickinson chose to use on the copies of the poems she kept, so that we can peer over her shoulder and see her composing and reworking her own poems.
The world’s foremost scholar of Emily Dickinson, Cristanne Miller, guides us through these stunning poems with her deft and unobtrusive notes, helping us understand the poet’s quotations and allusions, and explaining how she composed, copied, and circulated her poems. Miller’s brilliant reordering of the poems transforms our experience of them.
13. Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition
Author: by Seamus Heaney
English
260 pages
0393330109
Seamus Heaney’s best-selling ?Beowulf? Is now wedded to more than one hundred glorious images. Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf ? Is the elegiac narrative of the Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel’s mother.
Drawn to what he has called the “four-squareness of the utterance” in ?Beowulf ? And its immense emotional credibility Seamus Heaney gives the great epic convincing reality But how to visualize the poet’s story has always been a challenge for modern-day readers.
In Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition, John D. Niles, a specialist in Old English literature, provides visual counterparts to Heaney’s remarkable translation. More than one hundred full-page illustrationsViking warships, chain mail, lyres, spearheads, even a reconstruction of the Great Hallmake visible Beowulf’s world and the elemental themes of his story: death, divine power, horror, heroism, disgrace, devotion, and fame.
14. Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku
Author: by Natalie Goldberg
English
176 pages
1608686973
One of the world’s foremost writing teachers invites readers on a joyful journey into the reading and origins of haiku A haiku is three simple lines. But it is also, as Allen Ginsberg put it, three lines that make the mind leap.
A good one, he said, lets the mind experience a small sensation of space which is nothing less than God. As many spiritual practices seek to do, the haiku’s spare yet acute noticing of the immediate and often ordinary grounds the reader in the pure awareness of now.
Natalie Goldberg is a delightfully companionable tour guide into this world. She highlights the history of the form, dating back to the seventeenth century; shows why masters such as Basho and Issa are so revered; discovers Chiyo-ni, an important woman haiku master; and provides insight into writing and reading haiku.
A fellow seeker who travels to Japan to explore the birthplace of haiku, Goldberg revels in everything she encounters, including food and family, painting and fashion, frogs and ponds. She also experiences and allows readers to share in the spontaneous and profound moments of enlightenment and awakening that haiku promises.
15. African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (LOA #333): A Library of America Anthology (The Library of America)
Author: by Kevin Young
English
1170 pages
1598536664
A literary landmark: the biggest, most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the presentAcross a turbulent history, from such vital centers as Harlem, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them.
Capturing the power and beauty of this diverse tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry reveals as never before its centrality and its challenge to American poetry and culture. One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest.
The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people like Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voice their passionate resistance to slavery. Young’s fresh, revelatory presentation of the Harlem Renaissance reexamines the achievements of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen alongside works by lesser-known poets such as Gwendolyn B.Bennett and Mae V.Cowdery.
16. Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry
Author: by The Library of Congress
English
240 pages
0393867919
A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today. Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry.
This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the projectincluding Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among othersto offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands.
The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship.
