null Skip to main content

2 for £15 on selected paperbacks | Free UK P&P on orders over £25

The Hatred of Poetry

Format: Paperback
£10.99

No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It’s even bemoaned by poets: ‘I, too, dislike it,’ wrote Marianne Moore. ‘Many more people agree they hate poetry,’ Ben Lerner writes, ‘than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore.’

In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defence of the art. He examines poetry’s greatest haters (beginning with Plato’s famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.

Write a Review

There are no reviews for this product yet - be the first

Authors:
Lerner, Ben
Year Published:
2016
Country of Publication:
United Kingdom
Format:
Paperback
ISBN:
9781910695159
Number of Pages:
120
Publication Date:
07/06/2016
Publisher:
Fitzcarraldo Editions
Place of Publication:
London
Language:
English
SKU:
9781910695159

Customers also bought