Download e-book for kindle: Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure: The Dirty Art of Poetry by William Logan

William Logan has been a thorn within the part of yank poetry for greater than 3 many years. although he has been referred to as the “most hated guy in American poetry,” his witty and articulate studies have reminded us how muscular sturdy reviewing will be. those new essays and stories take poetry at its note, usually discovering in its toughest circumstances the best purposes for wish. Logan starts off with a witty polemic opposed to the desire to have critics announce their aesthetics whenever they start a overview. “The insufferable Rightness of feedback” is a plea to learn these critics who received it improper after they reviewed Lyrical Ballads or Leaves of Grass or The Waste Land. occasionally, he argues, such critics observed precisely what those books were—they observed the poems undeniable, but usually didn't see that they have been poems. In such wrongheaded feedback, readers can get well the floor damaged by way of such groundbreaking books. Logan seems to be back on the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, and Philip Larkin; on the letters of T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell; and at new books by way of Louise Glück and Seamus Heaney. continually desirous to overturn settled judgments, Logan argues that global struggle II poets have been in spite of everything greater than the much-lauded poets of global battle I. He revisits the secretly revised version of Robert Frost’s notebooks, exhibiting that the poor blunders ruining the 1st version nonetheless exist. the main awesome essay is “Elizabeth Bishop at summer season Camp,” which prints for the 1st time her early adolescent verse, in addition to the intimate letters written to the 1st lady she loved.