Reviews for Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry

The average rating for Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-06-27 00:00:00 Matthew Fox In addition to Baker and Townsend, there are essays by Linda Gregerson, Stanley Plumly, Eric Pankey, Carl Phillips, Richard JAckson, all poets who are now either in late middle age, old, or even dead. The book was published in 2007, and is often a brilliant summary about what the lyric poem was for a couple of generations of academic poets. In that case it is very useful. The method of each essay is recognizable. These very smart, very well educated writers establish a base line for understanding (eg: elegy, love poem, ode) in the classical tradition, in the renaissance, or in the 19th century, talk a lot about that and then find correlations in the modern, even, very occasionally, the contemporary. It certainly works as a good refresher or even as an introductory text with nuance and complications. it is a summary of what we (or some of us, anyway) understood to be poetry (and the criticism of poetry) for a few decades. But what struck me as odd is how dated this book felt. It was published in 2007, yet if feels very old. There is nothing of the questions of identity, engagement, vulnerability or urgency that seem to be motivating the conversation now. There is nothing about learning from the rhythms of popular music, the patterns that have become forms for a new generation of poets. Now, I am one of the old ones, and I am not at all sure that the ways we're talking about poetry now are not simply superficial fashions that might disappear in a couple of years. But I've got to think there will be lingering forms and attitudes that will enrich the discussion of poetry, more so than continued discussion of received forms and enriched syntax.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-01-04 00:00:00 Daniel Burke Good but inconsistent.