The fourth dimension of a poem: and other essays

✍ Scribed by Abrams, Meyer Howard

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 174 KB
• Edition: First edition
• Category: Fiction
• City: New York
• ISBN: 0393089231

✦ Synopsis

The fourth dimension of a poem -- Keats' poems : the material dimensions -- What is a humanistic criticism? -- The language and methods of humanism -- How to prove an interpretation -- "This green earth" : the vision of nature in the Romantic poets -- Kant and the theology of art -- Spiritual travelers in the literature of the West -- Point-blank prose : the essays of William Hazlitt.;In the year of his one-hundredth birthday, pre-eminent literary critic, scholar and teacher M.H. Abrams brings us a collection of nine new and recent essays that challenge the reader to think about poetry in new ways. In these essays, three of them never before published, Abrams engages afresh with pivotal figures in intellectual and literary history, among them Kant, Keats and Hazlitt. The centrepiece of the volume is Abrams's eloquent and incisive essay "The Fourth Dimension of a Poem" on the pleasure of reading poems aloud, accompanied by online recordings of Abrams's revelatory readings of poems such as William Wordsworth's "Surprised by Joy", Alfred Tennyson's "Here Sleeps the Crimson Petal" and Ernest Dowson's "Cynara". The collection begins with a foreword by Abrams's former student Harold Bloom.

✦ Subjects

Poetry -- History and criticism