The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose : Moral Essays on the Poet's Calling

The University of Chicago Press

The Cure of Poetry in an Age of ProseMoral Essays on the Poet's Calling\nAuthor(s): Mary Kinzie\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: The University of Chicago Press, United States\nImprint: University of Chicago Press\nISBN-13: 9780226437354, 978-0226437354\nSynopsis\nThe role of the poet, Mary Kinzie writes, is to engage the most profound subjects with the utmost in expressive clarity. The role of the critic is to follow the poet, word for word, into the arena where the creative struggle occurs. How this mutual purpose is served, ideally and practically, is the subject of this bracingly polemical collection of essays. A distinguished poet and critic, Kinzie assesses poetry's situation during the past twenty-five years. Ours, she contends, is literally a prosaic age, not only in the popularity of prose genres but in the resultant compromises with truth and elegance in literature. In essays on \""the rhapsodic fallacy,\"" confessionalism, and the romance of perceptual response, Kinzie diagnose.