Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The still-vocal critic of Sexual Personae, a book that drew on poetry and painting for its de-deconstructions of gender, checks in with an anthology of 43 poems, along with her own close readings of them. Her introduction offers a jumble of justifications for undertaking such a project (though she is "unsure whether the West's chaotic personalism can prevail against the totalizing creeds that menace it," she hopes it will), but the readings themselves reveal Paglia's fascination with poetry, which she likens "to addiction or to the euphoria of being in love." The book's first half presents canonical work that Paglia has found "most successful in the classroom" (Shakespeare, Blake, Dickinson, etc.). The second features mostly canonical modernist and confessional work (Stevens, Williams, Toomer, Roethke and Plath), with a few more recent pieces. Clocking in mostly at two to four pages, Paglia's readings sound a lot like classroom preambles to discussion—offering background, lingering over provocative lines, venturing provisional interpretations. Some of what she says comes off as grandiose (Roethke's " 'Cuttings' is a regrounding of modern English poetry in lost agrarian universals"), some as boilerplate, some as inspired. Though hit-and-miss, Paglia's picks and appraisals provide the requisite spark for jump-starting returns to poetry. (Apr. 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

A volcanic mountain has labored, and brought forth a mouse: The sexy celebrity bad-girl cultural critic of the '90s has produced a flawed but serviceable brief textbook.

A professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Camille Paglia won acclaim and even notoriety with Sexual Personae (1990) whose 700-plus pages emphasized the "amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism and pornography in great art," from prehistory to Emily Dickinson and Henry James. Since then she has become a prolific commentator on popular culture and film. By these standards, Break, Blow, Burn is modest: It tries to introduce good, accessible short poems in English and to help readers enjoy them as Paglia does.

That is what good teachers do, and the first three-quarters of the book follows through, offering patient, vigorous and largely uncontroversial explication of poems by Shakespeare, Donne (whom her title quotes), Wordsworth, Coleridge and others. Obsolete double meanings, obsolescent things (a root cellar, for example) and, especially, biblical references need old-fashioned explanations, which Paglia provides with skill.

She also proves entertainingly willing to say not only what a poem does and means, but why she likes it. Some sentences sound outrageous but in fact offer imaginative guidance, as when Paglia imagines William Blake roaming London "with telepathic hearing and merciless X-ray eyes" or explains Walt Whitman's universe as "a plush matrix or webwork of gummy secretions."

It's hard to show introductory-level students how poems speak to one another across generations when those students come to class having read so few. Paglia surmounts that problem by comparing the poems she's chosen to one another, even when such comparisons may not be what the poets had in mind.

Her obsessions can interfere with her aims. Paglia sees paintings or movies almost every time she looks at a poem. Shakespeare has "a Mannerist sophistication"; one poem of Donne's "resembles Surrealist art," and another proves "analogous to Caravaggio." Shelley's "Ozymandias" recalls "Raphael's revealing 1518 portrait" of Pope Leo X, even though the poet's "technique resembles that of the motion picture camera." Wallace Stevens's "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" "prefigures the psychedelic flamboyance of Pop Art." (She does better with Stevens than that miscue implies, as when she contends, for example, that his famous "jar in Tennessee" may contain moonshine.)

Paglia also sees sex everywhere -- in Donne, Whitman and Theodore Roethke, where it really is everywhere, but also in George Herbert and Wordsworth, where it isn't. She gets Herbert's dense, gloomy "Church-monuments" just right but his much-admired "Love (III)" badly wrong, turning a pellucid lyric of agape into an unrecognizable "languid, hypnotic" drama of "tumescence and penetration." Paglia's constant search for images of coitus makes her not a taboo-breaking innovator but a throwback to the Freudian critics of her youth.

It also limits her tastes, especially in the last quarter of this book. "Art making," for Paglia, "draws on primitive, amoral, erotic energies." She is attracted, understandably, to poets who share that view and avoids poets whose best work tends to confute it: no Pope, Auden, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop or Marianne Moore. Instead we get "a hipster's syncopated ode to female sexual power," by Paul Blackburn (not a bad poem, by the way), a 10-page exegesis of Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" ("one of the strongest poems ever written by a woman"), three poems by Roethke and nothing else by Plath. As the selections approach the present, they grow stranger and harder to defend.

In her introduction, Paglia suggests that today's "most honored poets" are overrated, describing their "poetic language" as "stale and derivative." It should be no wonder, then, that she omits almost all of them. The contemporary poems she does choose come from several styles and schools (May Swenson's precisionism, Gary Snyder's Zen notation, Norman H. Russell's Midwestern plain speech, Chuck Wachtel's collage, Wanda Coleman's performance-oriented directness). All, however, share an absence of surface complexity: You can think hard about these poems if you want, but you won't have to decode any abstractions or unravel intricate syntax to "get" them.

Paglia concludes with the words to Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock," a wonderful song about which she says baffling things: "This is an important modern poem -- possibly the most popular and influential poem composed in English since Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy.' " The clichéd overstatement seems harmless, but the casual dismissal of all contemporary page-based poetry is not. Nor is the cavalier attitude toward music history: Is "Woodstock" more influential than "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Anarchy in the U.K." or "Rapper's Delight"? After 200 pages of handy exegeses, it's a shame that Paglia ends her book with what looks less like literary (or cultural) criticism than a bid for attention or an expression of Baby Boomer myopia.

Against the academics she disdains, Paglia strives to -- and does -- write clearly. Sometimes she is no better than clear: "Coleman's vernacular is so alive it practically jumps off the page." Paglia's isn't and doesn't. There are also mistakes, though not so many as to imperil her project: Donne, who insisted that his secular poetry circulate only in manuscript, supposedly "shows a feel for the printed page." "Night's barbecue," in Jean Toomer's "Georgia Dusk," is a real Georgia pit roast, not (or not literally) a cannibal feast. Yeats's "The Second Coming" is missing its stanza break. And why not give dates of composition or publication (as a more traditional anthology would)?

Paglia's volume will not satisfy readers already familiar with the dead famous poets whose poems take up most of it. But such readers are not her intended audience. Break, Blow, Burn will be the first book about poetry that many Americans, of several generations, ever read. They could do a lot worse.

Reviewed by Stephen Burt
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (January 24, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375725393
• ISBN-13: 978-0375725395
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #74,014 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

71 of 82 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The fires of poetry, March 29, 2005

By	John Zxerce "[e-mail]" (Colorado ^^^) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (Hardcover)

Paglia offers a book to a generation absorbed with images, detached from the interior of culture. Paglia writes, "The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.'' Here she demonstrates the power of words for suggesting images better than those seen with eyes.

Paglia is captivated by poetry. The reader's interest develops when she carefully (maybe a little dryly) commentates on one poem at a time - avoiding general brushstrokes as she identifies the subtleties from various lines. As it's been said, "from this book you could doubt several aspects of her taste in poetry. But you couldn't doubt her love of it."

You can hear Paglia's disappointment when she writes, "Along the way I've encountered so many people in the publishing world, in magazines, who said to me, you know, 'I always keep up with the new novels, but not poetry.' These are really literary people, and even they feel poetry no longer speaks to them."

Paglia suggests an explanation for the decline in the love of poetry, "Thanks to 25 years of post-structuralism in our elite colleges, we have this idea now that you are supposed to use your pseudo-sociological critical eye to look down on the work and find everything that's wrong with it," ...this style of teaching just nips students' enthusiasm in the bud."

However, her statement is tempered by what I appreciate most - her discrimination regarding true talent and her lack of tolerance for those poetry artists who insist on using it as an instrument of civil rights - while at the same time lacking excellence in their work.

While Paglia's selection of 43 poems may be `eclectic', she comments on superior works including Shelley's retro-prophetic `Ozymandias', Coleridge's heroic `Kubla Khan', and Wallace Stevens's gem `Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock'

Paglia's strength is teaching us how to visualize implication in the once inconsequential, and thereby to making a poem alive and memorable. Perhaps that's the very purpose of poetry.

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars stop whining., June 26, 2005

By	No One Special - See all my reviews

This review is from: Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (Hardcover)

honestly people, stop whining already!

My mother sent me this book after I discovered a latent admiration and adoration of Edmund Spenser, and for that matter, all structured poetry. (never been a big fan of all that mindless crap that so-called poets are constantly spewing.)
Her advice was to read "The Faerie Queene" in conjunction with "Sexual Personae", advice which I gratefully (if a bit cautiously) took... after all she is my mother and not entirely "with the times" per se.
And thus, my discovery of Camille Paglia (and since I am not as old as some of the other reviewers and was born WAAAAAY after whatever controversy she was involved in, and I simply don't know for god's sake I'm only 20). I find her to be witty and intelligent as well as eloquent, with a deliciously fine grasp of language. Her writing style alone makes this book enjoyable.

However, (isn't there always a 'however'?) as she puts it, the poems in the book are HER choices and since choice signifies subjectivism it is safe to say that not everyone will agree as to the A) importance and B) prominence of said poems. That may seem redundant, however it is not.
Also, she specifically states that ALL of the poems are originally written in ENGLISH. Thus there is no Baudelaire. No Petrarch (I'm 99% certain I misspelled that but I'm too lazy to check). In fact, not a single "multicultural" poem in the lot. If you take issue with that then you should look at something else to read.

I would recommend this book. I certainly find it delightful (and her critiques are well thought out and well executed, none of that high-brow, ivory tower academic nonsense). I quite like this book and have decided to read through all the rest of her writings.

but then again, I'm only twenty and not exactly an authority on these matters.

p.s. I'd give the book more stars but I'd like to re-read it first...

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I am glad I bought it and glad I read it, October 2, 2005

By	Paul R. Greenhow (Lynchburg, VA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (Hardcover)

Break, Blow, Burn has been waiting in my pile of books to be read for a few weeks now, but I was finally driven to it as a result of a review in the October Poetry Magazine. That review was generally positive, but probably not clear enough to have encouraged me to buy.

Anyway, I enjoyed the book. Paglia has chosen 43 of what she describes as the world's best poems. Not the top 43 it should be said. Her choice is eclectic, as mine or yours would be. Some I endorse, others not. Her close reading of them is enjoyable, intelligent, well written and occasionally enlightening. I disagree with many of the conclusions she draws, and so would you, probably, but I find reading another insight to be of value and that, again occasionally, they modify my own view. What more could you ask.

Paglia is not a great proponent of contemporary poetry and the latest she includes are the lyrics to Woodstock by Joni Mitchell.

The Washington Post review included at Amazon considers that the book will not satisfy readers acquainted with the dead poets she includes. If correct, that is a pity. Those of us that spend much time with long dead poets do tend to achieve a world view of the poet that becomes immutable. Our loss, and to read other views is invaluable, for me at least. Perhaps he complains of a lack of depth, personally I am all for brevity and clarity rather than the mystery that some critics feel is necessary. Of course, what review would be complete without the need to demonstrate the author's ignorance and the reviewer's wisdom. The errors that Stephen Burt picks out are hardly material and a wiser reviewer would have omitted them.


I am glad I bought it and glad I read it.