The Power of Less: Essays on Poetry & Public Speech - Tapa blanda

Reseña del editor

The greatest poets in history have endured because their expressed visions have helped us see and feel those things that are permanently true of the human condition. In our era when so much of what passes for poetry is really sociology, ideology, rhetoric or mere wordplay, it is well to be reminded of the fact that great poetry is more than that. Whether it inspires insight or wonder, visionary poetry is more than a different use of language. It is another language--a language that always manages to outlive its authors, its circumstances and the time of its creation. Poems come into existence out of absolute and unavoidable and largely inexplicable necessity. They are ongoing presences, and ongoing presences have no past tense because they always exist in the now. In this sense, Ezra Pound noted, all literature--if it is literature at all--is contemporary. "Each of the essays in this book deals with some aspect of poetry's visionary nature--its awe-inspiring impact; its reliance upon feeling as being more dependable a form of knowledge than the conclusions of science or discursive reason; its capacity to convey the mysterious so that the final result is not mere pleasure but wisdom; its essential difference from mere verse; its challenge to translators who struggle to re-create in one language what is poetically present in another; its capability of inspiring poets to spring the locks of falsifying or stultifying forms of expression in order to say what they feel and see as they actually felt and saw it."