Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry

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University of Chicago Press, Apr 5, 2001 - Literary Criticism - 256 pages
Skeptical Music collects the essays on poetry that have made David Bromwich one of the most widely admired critics now writing. Both readers familiar with modern poetry and newcomers to poets like Marianne Moore and Hart Crane will relish this collection for its elegance and power of discernment. Each essay stakes a definitive claim for the modernist style and its intent to capture an audience beyond the present moment.

The two general essays that frame Skeptical Music make Bromwich's aesthetic commitments clear. In "An Art without Importance," published here for the first time, Bromwich underscores the trust between author and reader that gives language its subtlety and depth, and makes the written word adequate to the reality that poetry captures. For Bromwich, understanding the work of a poet is like getting to know a person; it is a kind of reading that involves a mutual attraction of temperaments. The controversial final essay, "How Moral Is Taste?," explores the points at which aesthetic and moral considerations uneasily converge. In this timely essay, Bromwich argues that the wish for excitement that poetry draws upon is at once primitive and irreducible.

Skeptical Music most notably offers incomparable readings of individual poets. An essay on the complex relationship between Hart Crane and T. S. Eliot shows how the delicate shifts of tone and shading in their work register both affinity and resistance. A revealing look at W. H. Auden traces the process by which the voice of a generation changed from prophet to domestic ironist. Whether discussing heroism in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, considering self-reflection in the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, or exploring the battle between the self and its images in the work of John Ashbery, Skeptical Music will make readers think again about what poetry is, and even more important, why it still matters.

From inside the book

Contents

An Art without Importance
1
Poetic Invention and the SelfUnseeing
19
TS Eliot and Hart Crane
32
Crane and His Letters
51
Stevens and the Idea of the Hero
67
Marianne Moore as Discoverer
90
That Weapon SelfProtectiveness Notes on a Friendship
102
Elizabeth Bishops DreamHouses
116
Answer Heavenly Muse Yes or No
143
Geoffrey Hill and the Conscience of Words
151
Ted Hughess River
163
A Poet and Her Burden
174
John Ashbery The Self against Its Images
185
Hemingways Valor
205
How Moral Is Taste?
232
INDEX
253

The Making of the Auden Canon
132

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About the author (2001)

David Bromwich is the Housum Professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s, published by the University of Chicago Press, and A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost.

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