Quick, joyful, and playfully astringent, with surprising comparisons and examples, this collection takes an unconventional approach to the art of poetry. Instead of rules, theories, or recipes, Singing School emphasizes ways to learn from great work: studying magnificent, monumentally enduring poems and how they are made-- in terms borrowed from the "singing school" of William Butler Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium."

Robert Pinsky's headnotes for each of the 80 poems and his brief introductions to each section take a writer's view of specific works: William Carlos Williams's "Fine Work with Pitch and Copper" for intense verbal music; Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" for wild imagination in matter-of-fact language; Robert Southwell's "The Burning Babe" for surrealist aplomb; Wallace Stevens's "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" for subtlety in meter. Included are poems by Aphra Behn, Allen Ginsberg, George Herbert, John Keats, Mina Loy, Thomas Nashe, and many other master poets.

This anthology respects poetry's mysteries in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 08/05/2013
ISBN: 9780393050684
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.88lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.70w x 0.90d

Review Citations: Library Journal Prepub Alert 03/15/2013 pg. 93
Booklist 08/01/2013 pg. 21
Choice 05/01/2014
Library Journal 03/15/2013