Archibald MacLeish
![Poetry and Experience Archibald MacLeish]( "Poetry and Experience Archibald MacLeish")
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By: Houghton Mifflin (T)
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1
Average rating: 5.0 of 5
Good study, good how-to and just good reading! 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.
If you're into literature at all, then reading a study of poetry by one of the all-time greats is a joy. The writing is conversational, yet literate and holds the reader's interest. If you're not devoting your life to literature, but you need a resource, it's an excellent, accessible treatise.
MacLeish says that to understand what poetry is, you need a poet as a guide, since "the critics, though they have mapped those mountains, have never climbed them themselves." But he's referring not just to himself, but to a third-century Chinese poet, Lu Chi, who not only wrote poetry but wrote about the great writers he knew, and about "how a poem gets itself written." As MacLeish is our guide, Lu Chi is MacLeish's and appears throughout the book.
Chapter One, 'Words As Sounds', examines "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas. Chapter Two on 'Words as Signs' looks at a variety of poems and verses to consider: "Is there, within or in some other association with the lovely structure of the sounds, a structure of meanings?" Chapters Three and Four consider image and metaphor.
The last 4 chapters study individual poets and "The Shape of Meaning" : Emily Dickinson ('The Private World'); W. B. Yeats ('The Public World'); Artur Rimbaud ('The Anti-World'); and John Keats ('The Arable World').
There's a very good, though longer and more detailled book used by many colleges, called "Western Wind." I can recommend that one, too, but MacLeish is terrific and more succinct (gets it all in 199 pages, in my edition), and may be just what you're looking for. MacLeish would also be a good supplement to "Western Wind" if you're using WW in a class and would like a different explication and perspective. It deserves to be back in print, but used copies are, at this writing, readily available.
