
- 285 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
My Poets
About this book
A thrillingly original exploration of a life lived under poetry's uniquely seductive spell
"Oh! there are spirits of the air," wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley. In this stunningly original book Maureen N. McLane channels the spirits and voices that make up the music in one poet's mind. Weaving criticism and memoir,
My Poets explores a life reading and a life read. McLane invokes in
My Poets not necessarily the best poets, nor the most important poets (whoever these might be), but those writers who, in possessing her, made her. "I am marking here what most marked me," she writes. Ranging from Chaucer to H.D. to William Carlos Williams to Louise Glück to Shelley (among others), McLane tracks the "growth of a poet's mind," as Wordsworth put it in
The Prelude. In a poetical prose both probing and incantatory, McLane has written a radical book of experimental criticism. Susan Sontag called for an "erotics of interpretation": this is it. Part
Bildung, part dithyramb, part exegesis,
My Poets extends an implicit invitation to you, dear reader, to consider who your "my poets," or "my novelists," or "my filmmakers," or "my pop stars," might be.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Notice
- Contents
- Dedication
- Epigraphs
- 1. Proem in the Form of a Q&A
- 2. My Chaucer / Kankedort
- 3. My Impasses: On Not Being Able to Read Poetry
- 4. My Elizabeth Bishop / (My Gertrude Stein)
- 5. My Wallace Stevens
- 6. My William Carlos Williams
- 7. My Marianne Moore
- 8. My H.D.
- 9. My Translated: An Abecedary
- 10. My Louise Glück
- 11. My Fanny Howe
- 12. My Poets I: An Interlude in the Form of a Cento
- 13. My Emily Dickinson / My Emily Dickinson
- 14. My Shelley / (My Romantics)
- 15. My Poets II: An Envoi in the Form of a Cento
- Works Consulted or Remembered and Further Reading
- My Acknowledgments
- Permissions Acknowledgments
- Also by Maureen N. McLane
- Copyright