The Craft of Poetry Dialogues on Minimal Interpretation [Hardcover]

This book presents an innovative format for poetry criticism that its authors call dialogical poetics. This approach shows that readings of poems, which in academic literary criticism often look like a product of settled knowledge, are in reality a continual negotiation between readers. But Derek Attridge and Henry Staten agree to rein in their own interpretive ingenuity and minimally interpret poems  reading them with careful regard for what the poem can be shown to actually say, in detail and as a whole, from opening to closure. Based on a series of emails, the book explores a number of topics in the reading of poetry, including historical and intellectual context, modernist difficulty, the role of criticism, and translation. This highly readable book will appeal to anyone who enjoys poetry, offering an inspiring resource for students whilst also mounting a challenge to some of the approaches to poetry currently widespread in the academy.

Acknowledgments  Introduction: Dialogical poetics  Chapter 1: Minimal interpretation  Chapter 2: Figurative language  Chapter 3: Historical context  Chapter 4: Intellectual and cultural context  Chapter 5: Situated subjects  Chapter 6: Poetic commentary  Chapter 7: Modernist poetry and discursive logic  Chapter 8: The poetry of ellipsis  Chapter 9: Translation  Index

Intelligent readers of poetry, F. R. Leavis once suggested, characteristically offer their responses to a poem in the form this is so, isnt it?, appealing both for confirmation that their findings are so, but also expecting and welcoming from their listeners qualifications, reserves, corrections, in the form yes, but.... The Craft of Poetry offers a rare opportunity to see in actionthe processes of dialogic exchange by which two readers can come to a fuller imaginative possesl£8