Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language

Front Cover
Yale University Press, Jul 25, 1990 - Poetry - 262 pages
Demonstrating a poet's imaginative ear and a critic's range of concern, John Hollander here writes about the melodious guile with which poetry speaks to us. Through analysis of formal and rhetorical patterns in examples chosen from the whole spectrum of English and American poetry, Hollander describes how poems form self-reflexive parable in order to represent realms beyond themselves.
As astute a book about poetry as anyone has produced in the last five years.--David Lehman, Newsday
A lively and enlivening work of criticism.--Library Journal
Hollander, himself a fine poet, is such a generalist; and Melodious Guile, to my mind the best of his critical books, takes its place . . . among the very few enjoyable and enriching studies of how poetry works.--Alastair Fowler, London Review of Books
An incisive display of beautifully integrated erudition. John Hollander demonstrates, just as post-structuralism is waning, that there are other, more cogent theoretical terms for thinking about poetry and for a return to the reading of poetry.--Robert Alter, University of California, Berkeley
Nominated for a 1988 National Book Circle Award in Criticism

From inside the book

Contents

Questions of Poetry
18
Poetic Answers
41
Poetic Imperatives
64
Bondage Work
85
Necessary Hieroglyphs
111
Some Notes on Refrain
130
Spensers Undersong
148
A Long Line
164
The Poetics of Character
194
Examples and Fictions
207
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1990)

John Hollander has edited several Everyman's Library Pocket Poet volumes, including "Robert Frost", "Christmas Poems", "War Poems", "Marriage Poems", "Animal Poems", & "Garden Poems". He is the A. Bartlett Biamatti Professor of English at Yale University, & the author of numerous books of poetry & criticism. He was made a MacArthur Fellow in 1990.

Bibliographic information