Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5257212 in Books
• Published on: 1996-06-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 360 pages

Customer Reviews

good introduction to modern prosody
There's a lot in this book which the reader will see repeated in other books on prosody -- an introductory chapter dealing with the relations between form and rhythm on one hand and content and meaning on the other; an analysis of the changes between Romantic versification and the modern period, beginning with the work of Dickinson, Hopkins, Hardy, and Whitman; the importance of the Imagists; the opening shots by Pound and Eliot in the Modernist revolution; and a few other topics.

Most of the book is handled very well. It's refreshing to see an analysis of Browning's pentameter style which emphasizes not his "colloquial" approach, as so many others do, but instead lauds the extent to which he moves AWAY from the colloquial style and more toward roughness and jaggedness. The Modern period is handled with finesse as well. The drawbacks to the book, in my opinion, begin with the period closer to the present. Some of the analyses on free verse do not make as much sense as similar analyses in Paul Fussell's "Poetic Meter and Poetic Form," despite the more recent volume's indebtedness to the former. As D. H. Lawrence said, it is no use manufacturing fancy laws for the governing of free verse. Too much weight is given to some poets who are clearly minor, such as Maxine Kumin, and too little to poets whose craftsmanship is unquestioned, such as Robert Lowell. Most oddly, there is no attention given to two of the finer formal craftsmen of recent history, James Merrill and Derek Walcott; these two use free verse but also expand the boundaries of traditional metrical approaches, and their efforts here should not go unnoticed. And I might take issue with the expanded coverage given to the most recent trend in prosody, the New Formalists, simply because, as I noted in my review of "Rebel Angels" for Amazon, they aren't that good and they haven't ADVANCED metrical techniques that much.

Aside from these qualms, "Sound and Form" is a good survey of prosody of the ! last century.