ABOUT THIS BOOK

Compiled by three noted poets, this is an eclectic, stimulating, and informed selection of poets' remarks on poetry spanning eras, ethnicities, and aesthetics. The 102 selections from nearly as many poets reach back to the Greeks and Romans, then draw on Chaucer, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Milton, on to Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, and Poe, then Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Rilke, and Pound, concluding with many of our contemporaries, including Hall, Clifton, Mackey, Kunitz, and Rukeyser. The book is divided into three sections. "Musing" concerns issues of inspiration, "Making," issues of craft, from diction to meter to persona and voice, and "Mapping," the role of poetry and the poet. Headnotes at the beginning of each selection provide background information about the poet and commentary on the significance of the selection. There is also a useful appendix with a listing of essays arranged according to more specific topics. As the poets write in their introduction: "This book was intended to deepen readers' understanding of age-old poetic ideas while at the same time pointing out new directions for thinking about poetry, juxtaposing the familiar and the strange, reconfiguring old boundaries, and shaking up stereotypes."

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Deborah Brown is a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester and author of News from the Grate. Annie Finch is director of the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine, and the author of a number of books, including The Body of Poetry, Calendars, Eve, and A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women. Maxine Kumin is one of America's most distinguished poets. Among her many awards are a Pulitzer Prize and a Ruth E. Lilly Poetry Prize. She is the author of many poetry collections, including Connecting the Dots, Up Country: Poems of New England, and Jack and Other New Poems. She lives in Warner, New Hampshire.

REVIEWS

"In my long shelf-life as a poet I have often been struck-amused, amazed, even made thoughtful-by the sharply opposing views of poets. . . . The views of the practitioners were what I was after, not those of the detached and theoretical critics. . . . Perhaps this book will invite the gestation of other texts that will fill in the blanks and expatiate further on the desire of poets to write about writing poems." -Maxine Kumin, from the Preface "Once again the brilliant Maxine Kumin and her co-editors have given us exactly what we need, this time an anthology of important works by poets on their craft. We who teach and write, edit and read will use Lofty Dogmas in full knowledge of wisdom in the gathering and delight in the words." -Hilda Raz, author of Divine Honors and TRANS, editor of Prairie Schooner "What a wonderful, valuable, and original book this is! . . . It has my highest recommendation." -Leon Stokesbury, author of Autumn Rhythm "Lofty Dogmas will introduce you to an academy of poets talking about their craft. This is a multipurpose book. It's good for teachers and students." -E. Ethelbert Miller, author of How We Sleep on the Nights We Don't Make Love

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
Acknowledgments	000
Appreciations	000
Preface by Maxine Kumin	000
Introduction: Poets on Poetics	000
[DES: Could the "from's" in the contents be made as inconspicuous as possible.]
Part 1: Musing
Moira Egan
	To My Muse, Upon Her Return	000
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus)
	from Book Two, Epistle III, To the Pisos	000
Po Chu-I
	Madly Singing in the Mountains	000
Sappho
	No Room for Grief	000
Sir Philip Sidney
	from Astrophil and Stella	000
Edmund Spenser
	Invocation to the Faerie Queene	000
William Blake
	from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell	000
Anne Bradstreet
	The Author to Her Book	000
Phillis Wheatley
	On Imagination	000
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
	from Preface to Kubla Khan	000
 John Keats
	from The Letters	000
Ralph Waldo Emerson
	from The Poet	000
Rainer Maria Rilke
	from Letters to a Young Poet	000
T. S. Eliot 
	Tradition and the Individual Talent	000
Federico GarcÆa Lorca
	from Play and Theory of Duende	000
Edward Hirsch
	from Fending Off the Duende	000
Donald Hall
	from Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird: Infantile Origins of Poetic Form	000
H.D.
	from Letter to Norman Holmes Pearson	000
Maxine Kumin
	from Coming Across: Establishing the Intent of a Poem	000
	from Closing the Door	000
Alicia Ostriker
	from Stealing the Language	000
	from Dancing at the Devil's Party	000
Nathaniel Mackey
	from Cante Moro	000
Seamus Heaney
	Digging	000
Lucille Clifton
	"when i stand around among poets . . ."	000
Wislawa Szymborska
	The Poet and the World, Nobel Lecture, 1996	000
Pablo Neruda
	from Towards the Splendid City, Nobel Lecture, 1971	000
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
	Diseuse	000
Julia Alvarez
	Housekeeping Cages	000
Jane Hirshfield
	Poetry as a Vessel of Remembrance	000
Part 2: Making
Callimachus
	from Prologue to The Aetia	000
Geoffrey Chaucer
	from Book Two, Troilus and Criseyde	000
Bash#
	from Kyorai's Conversations with Bash#	000
Ben Jonson
	A Fit of Rhyme Against Rhyme	000
Samuel Daniel
	from A Defense of Rhyme	000
John Milton
	from Introduction to Paradise Lost	000
Anne Finch
	The Appology	000
Alexander Pope
	from An Essay on Criticism	000
William Wordsworth
	from "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads	000
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
	from Biographia Literaria	000
Edgar Allan Poe
	from The Philosophy of Composition	000
Gerard Manley Hopkins
	from Preface to Poems	000
Paul ValÄry
	from Remarks on Poetry	000
William Carlos Williams
	The Poem as a Field of Action	000
Ezra Pound
	A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste	000
Marianne Moore
	from Feeling and Precision	000
William Butler Yeats
	from A General Introduction for My Work	000
Hart Crane
	from To Harriet Monroe, Editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse	000
Wallace Stevens
	from The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words	000
Robert Frost
	from Conversations on the Craft of Poetry with Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn 
Warren	000
Stanley Kunitz
	from Table Talk, A Paris Review Interview with Chris Busa	000
T. S. Eliot
	from Hamlet and His Problems	000
W. H. Auden
	from Writing	000
	from The Virgin & The Dynamo	000
	from The Poet & The City	000
Langston Hughes
	from The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain	000
Frank O'Hara
	Personism: A Manifesto	000
Louise Bogan
	from The Pleasures of Formal Poetry	000
Edna St. Vincent Millay
	"I will put Chaos into fourteen lines"	000
Theodore Roethke
	from How to Write Like Somebody Else	000
	from Some Remarks on Rhythm	000
Charles Olson
	from Projective Verse	000
Robert Duncan
	from Ideas on the Meaning of Form	000
Fanny Howe
	from an Interview with Daniel Kane	000
Heather McHugh
	from Moving Means, Meaning Moves	000
Richard Kostelanetz
	from More WordWorks	000
Harryette Mullen
	from A Conversation with Harryette Mullen	000
Marilyn Nelson
	from Owning the Masters	000
Lyn Hejinian
	from The Rejection of Closure	000
Rafael Campo
	from Of the Sonnet and Paradoxical Beauties: an interview with Joyce Wilson
	000
Yusef Komunyakaa
	from Control Is the Mainspring	000
Gertrude Stein
	from Patriarchal Poetry	000
Annie Finch
	from Coherent Decentering: Towards a New Model of the Poetic Self	000
Part 3: Mapping
Cesare Pavese
	from Postscript II: Notes on Certain Unwritten Poems	000
Anonymous
	from Egil's Saga	000
William Shakespeare
	Sonnet LV	000
Thomas Love Peacock
	from The Four Ages of Poetry	000
Percy Bysshe Shelley
	from A Defence of Poetry	000
Walt Whitman
	from Preface to Leaves of Grass 1855	000
	from Song of Myself, Stanza 2	000
Matthew Arnold
	from The Study of Poetry	000
Allen Tate
	from To Whom Is the Poet Responsible?	000
Rainer Maria Rilke
	from Letters to a Young Poet	000
Randall Jarrell
	from The Obscurity of the Poet	000
Howard Nemerov
	from The Difficulty of Difficult Poetry	000
Jorie Graham
	from Introduction to The Best American Poetry, 1990	000
Muriel Rukeyser
	from The Rare Union: Poetry and Science	000
LÄopold SÄdar Senghor
	from Elegy of Midnight	000
	from Elegy of the Trade Winds	000
Adrienne Rich
	from "What would we create?"	000
AimÄ CÄsaire
	from Notebook of a Return to the Native Land	000
Audre Lorde
	from Poetry is Not a Luxury	000
Denise Levertov
	from Horses with Wings	000
Gwendolyn Brooks
	from The Future of Black Poetry	000
Charles Bernstein
	Against National Poetry Month As Such	000
Judith Ortiz Cofer
	from And May He Be Bilingual	000
Joy Harjo
	from The Spiral of Memory	000
Anonymous
	The Dead Man Asks for a Song	000
Li-Young Lee
	from Interview with Marie Jordan	000
Lisa Robertson
	from How Pastoral: A Manifesto	000
Naomi Shihab Nye
	from Lights in the Windows	000
David Lehman
	from The Prose Poem: An Alternative to Verse	000
Alice Fulton
	from Of Formal, Free, and Fractal Verse: Singing the Body Electric	000
Elizabeth Bishop
	To John Frederick Nims	000
Robert Hass
	from Listening and Making	000
Richard Hugo
	from The Triggering Town	000
Richard Jackson
	from Why Poetry Today?	000
Derek Walcott
	from The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory. Nobel Prize Lecture, 1992	000
Czelaw Milosz
	Nobel Prize Lecture, 1980	000
Appendix: Thematic Index	000

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