Poetry and Its Others
News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres
What is poetry? Often it is understood as a largely self-enclosed verbal system – "suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse", in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin. But in "Poetry and Its Others", Jahan Ramazani reveals modern and contemporary poetry's animated dialogue with other genres and discourses. Poetry generates rich new possibilities, he argues, by absorbing and contending with its near verbal relatives.
Exploring poetry's vibrant exchanges with other forms of writing, Ramazani shows how poetry assimilates features of prose fiction but differentiates itself from novelistic realism; metabolizes aspects of theory and philosophy but refuses their abstract procedures; and recognizes itself in the verbal precision of the law even as it separates itself from the law's rationalism. But poetry's most frequent interlocutors, he demonstrates, are news, prayer, and song. Poets such as William Carlos Williams and W. H. Auden refashioned poetry to absorb the news while expanding its contexts; T. S. Eliot and Charles Wright drew on the intimacy of prayer though resisting its limits; and Paul Muldoon, Rae Armantrout, and Patience Agbabi have played with and against song lyrics and techniques. Encompassing a cultural and stylistic range of writing unsurpassed by other studies of poetry, "Poetry and Its Others" shows that we understand what poetry is by examining its interplay with what it is not.
About the Author
Jahan Ramazani is University Professor and the Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of multiple books, including, most recently, "Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres", also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Reviews
"It is delightful to watch Jahan Ramazani do what he does best: delve into poets such as Hopkins, Yeats, Heaney, and Muldoon and show us the nitty-gritty of how their verse works. Anyone who loves poetry is going to come away from this book revitalized, prepared to think complexly about the modes of address that poets employ, as well as the kinds of writing that they habitually echo, distort, take apart, and reassemble" – Brian M. Reed, University of Washington
"Jahan Ramazani is that rare critic who has read and understood a wide range of contemporary theory but is also a strong close reader, bringing his arguments alive through example. 'Poetry and Its Others' is a capstone of the work he has done so far, combining his interests in genre, hybridity, and dialogism; his remarkably wide, global knowledge of modern poetry in English; and his commitment to poetry as a distinctive lens and language by which to encounter the world. This impressive and richly suggestive book moves through so many large areas of poetic dialogue and reciprocity with other forms that it will be important to poetry lovers both in and outside academia" – Bonnie Costello, Boston University
