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. 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.
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.
Softcover. Ann Arbor MI, University of Michigan Press, 2nd pr., 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 462 pages. Illustrated in b&w. Includes bibliography. From rear cover: "From Kenneth Rexroth to the Czechoslovakian secret police, from Marianne Moore to the F.B.I., from Diana Trillling to Time magazine - Allen Ginsberg's work has always drawn a spirited response. Now, for the first time, these responses - remarks, reviews, and essays - have been collected in a single volume. Beginning with William Carlos Williams's early letters of support and ending with James Breslin's biographical analysis of 'The Origins of Howl and Kaddish', this collection reflects a full thirty years of praise, complaint, debate, and analysis of the work of one of the most innovative poets of our century". Previous owner's name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. Syracuse University Press , 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 493 pages. Remainder line and foxing to top edge, light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.
Softcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press;, reprint, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pictorial wrappers, 123 pages. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page and INSCRIBED by him on front fly leaf. Poems inspire our trust, argues James Longenbach in this bracing work, because they don't necessarily ask to be trusted. Theirs is the language of self-questioning--metaphors that turn against themselves, syntax that moves one way because it threatens to move another. Poems resist themselves more strenuously than they are resisted by the cultures receiving them. But the resistance to poetry is quite specifically the wonder of poetry. Considering a wide array of poets, from Virgil and Milton to Dickinson and Gluck, Longenbach suggests that poems convey knowledge only inasmuch as they refuse to be vehicles for the efficient transmission of knowledge. In fact, this self-resistance is the source of the reader's pleasure: we read poetry not to escape difficulty but to embrace it. An astute writer and critic of poems, Longenbach makes his case through a sustained engagement with the language of poetry. Each chapter brings a fresh perspective to a crucial aspect of poetry (line, syntax, figurative language, voice, disjunction) and shows that the power of poetry depends less on meaning than on the way in which it means--on the temporal process we negotiate in the act of reading or writing a poem. Readers and writers who embrace that process, Longenbach asserts, inevitably recoil from the exaggeration of the cultural power of poetry in full awareness that to inflate a poem's claim on our attention is to weaken it.
San Marino, Huntington Library, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 446 pages. Hardcover. Black covers with title and decoration in silver. Black & white illustrations. Some light pencil marking scattered throughout. Clean, tight copy.
