Invitation to Poetry
The Pleasures of Studying Poetry and Poetics
1. Edition December 2007
256 Pages, Softcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
For anyone who has ever wanted to become fluent in the language of
poetry, Invitation to Poetry will prove an essential guide. This
book:
* * Teaches the serious student how to 'speak poetry'
through an in-depth examination of the traditional features and
technical vocabulary of poetic language;
* * Examines British and American materials from the sixteenth
through the twentieth centuries in order to give students a sense
of a range of different period styles, poetic projects, and
strategies;
* * Explicitly examines, questions and challenges the relationship
of poetry to literary periods and canons;
* * Offers the technical tools essential for close reading and
interpretation across a broad chronological spectrum.
Acknowledgments.
1. Conceptual Syntax: An Introduction to the Way Poems Invite Different Approaches and Position Readers.
2. Speaking Poetry: Night Pieces and Intertextual Conversations.
3. The Gestures and Subjects of the Sonnet.
4. The Uses of Meter and Rhythm in the Sonnet.
5. The Form of the Voice: Tone and Diction.
6. Modes, Odes, and Odic Gestures.
7. What is Pastoral?.
8. Traditions, Legacies, and Individual Talents.
9. Forests and Trees, or Playing with Poems.
Index
-C. D. Blanton, University of California, Berkeley
"Lisa Steinman's Invitation to Poetry, with its effortless scholarship and engaging manner, offers a wonderful introduction to the study of poetry. This is a beautifully-written book which offers many pleasures, and for those who read attentively, a tremendous depth of reference underpinning its argument."
-Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, University of London