Customer Reviews

The Art of the Poetic Line

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Poet and literary critic James Longenbach presents The Art Of The Poetic Line, a discussion of the function of the line in metered, rhymed, syllabic, and free-verse poetry. Drawing upon classic examples ranging from Shakespeare and Milton to Ashbery and Gluck, The Art of the Poetic Line demystifies ambiguous elements in creating poetry to evoke mood and experience. "Poems are poems because we want to listen to them. Some poems have a prominent argument; some poems don't. But all poems live or die on their capacity to lure us from their beginning to their ends by a pattern of sounds. This is why a poem we don't understand may seem wonderfully satisfying, and this is why a poem we understand all too well may also seem wonderfully satisfying. A poem may harness the power of meter, rhyme, syntax, and line to establish and disrupt a pattern of sounds, and a poem may with equal integrity reject the power of meter, rhyme, syntax, and line. But the poet needs to understand what she is rejecting as well as what she is harnessing." Highly recommended for poetry connoisseurs, and an absolute must-read for poets and would-be poets of all walks of life.

How the topic of the poetic line caused angst for the first years of my serious attempts at reading and writing poetry. Longenbach's straghtforward and smart treatise on this topic would have saved me much distress. This book will be as helpful for the beginner as for the accomplished poet or MFA student. Thanks, Mr. Longenbach. This book will be within easy reach as I know I'll revisit it many more times!

Mr. Longenbach manages to explain poetic terms in ways I could understand, and I have read many poets/editors on how to write poetry. He presents a good discussion on why we should keep poetic structures by showing the power of the structured rhymes. These selections are not Hallmark type verses, but finely wrought poems which stick in the mind. He explains the value of sound in composition.

I agree with some of the reviewers that in this book, James Longenbach successfully abandons the notion of 'linebreaks' and replace it with three other smaller categories: annotated line, parsed line and end-stopped line. His approach allows readers (and therefore poets?) to rethink how to cut the lines in their works.

However, I think the book's title is quite misleading. The poetics of a line in a poem of course concerns meter, rhyme, syllables and stress. However, there is more. Longenbach spends the whole book analyzing the form of poetry, dissecting some of his examples from a structuralist point of view (and interesting, he does not mention stanza breaks). He has entirely neglected imagery and perhaps the part of speech of particular ending words in the poems matter even more. He limits his analysis from the formalist perspective and undermines the importance of lexical and thematic issues.

Furthermore, I don't agree with all of his poem analyses in this little book; some of them sound quite 'forced' to me.

It is necessary for budding poets to study form, in particular the poetic line,otherwise you end up writing prose. Other books concentrate on stimulating the muse. This book does not achieve this, but it does gives the reader poetic format.