From There: Some Thoughts on Poetry & Place
From There
Some Thoughts on Poetry & Place
By Stephen Burt
$10.95
- February 2016
- print ISBN: 978-1-55380-461-1
- ebook ISBN: 978-1-55380-462-8
- PDF ISBN: 978-1-55380-463-5
- 5 3/4″ x 9″, Trade Paperback, 56 pages
- Literary Criticism
- Out of print
In his 2015 Garnett Sedgewick lecture, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephen Burt discusses the relation of poetry to time, space and place. He examines the widespread and popular view of contemporary critics who claim that modern lyric poetry is supposed to have a speaking self who resides outside of space and time, and addresses readers who do not care who or where they are. In other words, place or the “there” of the poems is supposed to have no importance to the lyric voice. But taking his examples from Chaucer onwards through Shakespeare, the landscape poets of the eighteenth century, and Wordsworth, along with a number of prominent Canadian poets such as Elise Partridge and Newfoundland’s Mary Dalton, Burt shows that the lyric poem often relies importantly on an attachment to place and time. More significantly, he uncovers the fact that in lyric poetry “the contemplation of place is one way in which the ‘outside,’ what’s shared, potentially public . . . can seem to meet the ‘inside,’ the private or individual experience that we may consider ultimately unknowable (unless it is our own) and yet expect poetry to reproduce.” Reading Burt, one comes to see lyric poetry from a wholly new perspective.
Click here to read an excerpt from From There.
Garnett Sedgewick Memorial Lectures:
- More Heat than Light: Sex-difference Science & the Study of Language by Deborah Cameron (2012)
- Marvellous Repossessions: The Tempest, Globalization and the Waking Dream of Paradise by Jonathan Gil Harris (2011)
- John Donne and the Line of Wit: From Metaphysical to Modernist by P.G. Stanwood (2008)
- Living Language and Dead Reckoning: Navigating Oral and Written Traditions by J. Edward Chamberlin (2005)
- Spontaneous Overflows and Revivifying Rays: Romanticism and the Discourse of Improvisation by Angela Esterhammer (2004)
- “Servile Ministers”: Othello, King Lear and the Sacralization of Service by Michael Neill (2003)
- Grandchild of Empire: About Irony, Mainly in the Commonwealth by W.H. New (2002)
- The Generation of Caliban by Jonathan Goldberg (2001)
- Double Crossings: Madness, Sexuality and Imperialism by Anne McClintock (2000)
- Professing English at UBC: The Legacy of Roy Daniells and Garnett Sedgewick by Sandra Djwa (1999)