Customer Reviews

The Work of Poetry

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In an age in which poetry is judged as a kind of mood music, this book will appear strange, maybe arcane, "academic," or even hostile. However, this book is balm for anyone who knows what poetry really is. Hollander is among a handful of the best alive. His pedagogical skills and courtesies are enormous, and here carefully and generously deployed. Difficulties with this book are a function of the difficulties of poetry itself. Without which, as the doctor and poet WC Williams noted, men die miserably every day. Give it your best, and it will give you the best.

This is the best show-and-tell I have ever seen to the art of poetry. Instead of merely describing or defining various terms. Hollander unleashes all of his conisderable poetic talent to show you what a sonnet or a villanelle or an imabic pentameter line is. No one does it better. He has the entire range and history of English language poetry at his command. His ear is a natural wonder.

Perhaps, if you have a Ph.D. in English, belong to the Modern Languages Association, and teach in a university where postmodernism is requisite, this is the book for you. I gave up half way through, finding these essays for the most part too rambling and self-referential - too "academic." If you are not a professional academic but are curious about why and how poetry moves one, spend your money on Mary Oliver's A Handbook of Poetry - half the price, half the length, and twenty times the useful information.