Criticism Poetry

Softcover. NY, Cambridge University Press, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 482 pages. In this book Professor Gelpi traces the emergence of American Modernist poetry as a reaction to, and outgrowth of, the Romantic ideology of the nineteenth century. He focuses on the remarkable generation of poets who came to maturity in the years of the First World War and whose works constitute the principal body of poetic Modernism in English. This large historical argument is developed through monographic chapters on the poets which include close readings of their major poems. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, McGraw-Hill, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 474 pages. This wonderful collection contains all of Bogan's criticism, most of it written during her many years as poetry critic for The New Yorker magazine. "One does not easily recall another writer of such stature who served her fellow writers, and the reading public, for so long, or with such pertinence and distinction." She lived from 1897-1970. Flap price crossed out with smaller price in ink. Otherwise like new condition.

Hardcover. London, England, Macmillan and Co. , 2nd Edition, 1922, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 503 pages. Hardcover. Previous owner's name on front flyleaf. Blue cloth cover boards, gilt title on spine, some chipping to edges of boards. Tanning to pages and edges from age. Binding very good. Spine straight. Benedetto Croce is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His work in aesthetics and historiography has been controversial, but enduring.

Hardcover. NY, Atheneum, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 594 pages. A landmark in postwar American literary criticism, forty-one extended essays on contemporary poets, including Robert Bly, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, W.S. Merwin, Denise Levertov, and James Merrill. Blending biography, textual analysis, and philosophical reflection, it defined a generation's poetic discourse. The book stands as both a map of mid-century American verse and a statement of Howard's erudite critical voice. Light shelfwear, fraying to top, bottom of dust jacket spine. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Spuyten Duyvil, 1st, 1999, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 187 pages, Essays on contemporary American literature. Small bump to edge causing a slight wave to top edge, Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1st, 1964, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 351 pages. Green cloth with embossed gilt lettering on spine. With an Introduction by Peter Green and chapters including: The Meaning of Influence / Mr Eliot and the French Symbolist Poets / The Perspective of History / The Perspective of Language / The Perspective of Myth / etc. Short inscription on front fly leaf, darkening to dj, otherwise clean.

Softcover. Middlebury VT, Middlebury College Press, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 205 pages. Some fading to color on the covers, otherwise a tight, clean copy.

Ann Arbor MI, University of Michigan Press, 2nd pr., 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 334 pages. Sunning to spine, else near fine in wrappers. Edited by Anne Wright. A volume in the "Poets on Poetry". Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf otherwise clean.

Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st pbk, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 472 pages. The prose writings of Charles Olson (1910-1970) have had a far-reaching and continuing impact on post-World War II American poetics. Olson's theories, which made explicit the principles of his own poetics and those of the Black Mountain poets, were instrumental in defining the sense of the postmodern in poetry and form the basis of most postwar free verse. The Collected Prose brings together in one volume the works published for the most part between 1946 and 1969, many of which are now out of print. A valuable companion to editions of Olson's poetry, the book backgrounds the poetics, preoccupations, and fascinations that underpin his great poems. Included are Call Me Ishmael, a classic of American literary criticism; the influential essays "Projective Verse" and "Human Universe"; and essays, book reviews, and Olson's notes on his studies. In these pieces one can trace the development of his new science of man, called "muthologos," a radical mix of myth and phenomenology that Olson offered in opposition to the mechanistic discourse and rationalizing policy he associated with America's recent wars in Europe and Asia. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in an unclipped dust jacket, 248 pages. Errata slip laid in. Name on blank prelim pages. Otherwise clea.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 54 pages. Seamus Heaney's Nobel Lecture, captured here in Crediting Poetry, is a powerful defense of poetry as "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive politics and "world-sorrow." Beginning with the "creaturely existence" of his childhood in a thatched farmstead in rural County Derry, Heaney traces his path in "the wideness of language." It is a way forged by listening: to the "burbles and squeaks" of BBC and Radio Eireann from a wireless speaker, to the triple-rhyme in a line of Yeats', but also to the sound of gunfire in Ulster and the keening desolation of all the "wounded spots on the face of the earth." Out of all these sounds Heaney discovers the necessity of poetic order: "an order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew." Clean copy.

Softcover. Chicago, Gateway Books, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 517 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Lewisburg ME, Bucknell University Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with fading to spine and spine edge, 144 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Rinehart & Co., 1st, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 241 pages. The author Cook was an English professor at Middlebury College for many years, and involved with Bread Loaf Writer's Conference almost from its inception, as Robert Frost was. INSCRIBED by Robert Frost (the subject) to Cook (the author).

Hardcover. Washington DC, University Press of Washington D.C., 1st, 1953, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good,

Hardcover. Nashville TN, Vanderbilt University Press, 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light gray cloth with black and gilt title block on spine. 224 pages, Introduction by Louis D. Rubin Jr. B&w frontis portrait of participants: Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren,Merrill Moore, and others. The Fugitive was a poetry magazine published in the 1920s and this is a record of their gathering some 30 years later with their commentaries. Small name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 328 pages. William Logan has been a thorn in the side of American poetry for more than three decades. Though he has been called the "most hated man in American poetry," his witty and articulate reviews have reminded us how muscular good reviewing can be. These new essays and reviews take poetry at its word, often finding in its hardest cases the greatest reasons for hope. Logan begins with a devastating polemic against the wish to have critics announce their aesthetics every time they begin a review. "The Unbearable Rightness of Criticism" is a plea to read those critics who got it wrong when they reviewed Lyrical Ballads or Leaves of Grass or The Waste Land. Sometimes, he argues, such critics saw exactly what these books were-they saw the poems plain yet often did not see that they were poems. In such wrongheaded criticism, readers can recover the ground broken by such groundbreaking books. Logan looks again at the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Frank O'Hara, and Philip Larkin; at the letters of T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell; and at new books by Louise Gluck and Seamus Heaney. Always eager to overturn settled judgments, Logan argues that World War II poets were in the end better than the much-lauded poets of World War I. He revisits the secretly revised edition of Robert Frost's notebooks, showing that the terrible errors ruining the first edition still exist. The most remarkable essay is "Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp," which prints for the first time her early adolescent verse along with the intimate letters written to the first girl she loved. Clean, like new.

Hardcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press , 1st, 1977, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth covers, silver lettering, 152 pages. Light pencil marking in text.

Hardcover. New York, George Braziller, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 222 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Light edgewear to dust jacket and heavy fading on rear. Internally clean. Color illustrations by Hokusai.

Softcover. Durango CO, Logbridge-Rhodes, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 150 pages, b&w illustrations. Poems by Wright, with letters, interviews, memoirs, elegies, a chronology, and bibliography. Light fade to spine, otherwise clean copy.

Hardcover. UK, Oxford University Press, 2nd pr., 1926, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pale orange cloth with title on spine label. Former copy belonging to COUNTEE CULLEN (1903-1946), with his signature on the front fly leaf. Cullen was an American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright, particularly well known during the Harlem Renaissance. 248 pages, b&w frontis. Small paper scars to front endpapers, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 263 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 497 pages. "The critic Adam Plunkett expertly teases out the many meanings of Frost's poems . . . Blending biography and criticism, Plunkett shows how the circumstances of Frost's peripatetic life gave rise to some of his most successful poems. As in the best critical biographies, Plunkett does not merely track down real-world inspiration for a given work. Rather, he brings together Frost's personal life, literary sources, and publication history to enrich our understanding of the poems, then uses the poems to enhance our understanding of the life. The result is a thorough, elegant, and, at times, surprising study of Frost, who emerges as a remarkably complex poet and a compelling but complicated man." -Maggie Doherty, The New Yorker. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Gloucester, MA, Peter Smith, Reprint, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 321 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Green cloth covered boards with light wear to edges & black titles to spine. Faint soil to top edge. Otherwise clean inside and out. Tight copy.