Poems in Their Place

Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections

Neil Fraistat

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780807865392, 9780807816950
• eBook ISBN: 9781469617435
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

With essays by 13 leading scholars, this collection establishes the grounds for a new kind of poetics that considers the poetry book itself — the concept and the material fact — as an object of interpretation. The authors argue that the decisions poets make about the presentation of their works play a meaningful role in the poetic process and therefore should figure as part of the reading experience.

The common practice of approaching poems chronologically, as they are presented in anthologies or in posthumous editions, has been fostered by the long prevailing tendency of the New Criticism to treat each poem as self-contained. This volume urges the reader to reconsider the most fundamental ways that one reads, teaches, and inteprets poetry.

Moving from classical to contemporary poetry, these essays develop a literary history and theory for such a poetics, at the same time providing a generous set of models for a related practical criticism. At the heart of this collection are such issues as order, arrangement, and intertextuality. Reading poems in their place helps to return them to their historical contexts because the book itself has had a particular place in its own culture and society.

Originally published in 1987.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Index

• Abrams, M. H., 277, 287 (n. 9)
• Agricola, Johannes, 283
• Alvarez, A., 308
• Ambrose (bishop of Milan), 44
• Ammons, A. R.: Sphere: The Form oj a Motion, 297–300; Tape for the Turn of a Year, 297
• Andrewes, Lancelot, 172, 182
• Anne (queen of England), 211
• Aristotle, 79–80; Poetics, 69
• Arnold, Matthew: “The Scholar Gypsy,” 281
• Arnould, Joseph, 287 (n. 11)
• Ashbery, John: “Litany,” 303–5
• Auden, W. H., 13
• Audra, E., 209
• Augustine, Saint, 44, 68–70, 73, 79
• Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice, 34–35

• Bacon, Francis, 101
• Baker, Daniel, 232 (n. 22)
• Bannatyne, George, 14 (n. 4)
• Barker, Arthur, 168
• Battestin, Martin, 209
• Beal, Peter, 132, 158 (n. 9)
• Beckett, Samuel: Malone Dies, 31
• Berryman, John: The Freedom of a Poet, 296
• Bible
• —Epistles, 169–70
• —Genesis, 69
• —Gospels, 165, 169–70
• —Judges, 165, 178, 182, 185, 186–87
• —Revelation, 170, 187–88, 189
• Blake, William, 190; Poetical Sketches, 10, 11; Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 190
• Blessing, Richard Allen, 320
• Boccaccio, Giovanni, 20, 68
• Boileau, Nicolas, 215
• Bollas, Christopher, 314–15, 316, 317
• Borges, Jorge: Homage to Walt Whitman: A Collection of Poems in Spanish, with English Translations, 305–6
• Boulter, Robert, 108
• Bowles, William Lisle, 239, 240, 242, 246
• Breval, John Durant: The Confederates, 202
• Brower,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Poems in Their Place
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Place of the Book and the Book as Place
• Some Issues for Study of Integrated Collections
• The Theory and Practice of Poetic Arrangement from Vergil to Ovid
• Sequences, Systems, Models: Sidney and the Secularization of Sonnets
• Jonson, Marvell, and Miscellaneity?
• The Arrangement and Order of John Donne’s Poems
• “Strange Text!”: “Paradise Regain’d . . . To which is added Samson Agonistes”
• “Images Reflect from Art to Art”: Alexander Pope’s Collected Works of 1717
• Multum in Parvo: Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes of 1807
• The Book of Byron and the Book of a World
• The Arrangement of Browning’s Dramatic Lyrics (1842)
• Whitman’s Leaves and the American “Lyric-Epic”
• The Two Ariels: The (Re)Making of the Sylvia Plath Canon
• Index
• Notes on the Contributors