The Sound Sense of Poetry

Robinson explains how poetry makes things happen through the interaction of its chosen words and forms with the reader's responses.

Peter Robinson (Author)

9781108422963, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 September 2018

238 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.7 cm, 0.48 kg

What real role can poetry have in the world? How are its truths created by the words and sounds chosen by the poet and by the way readers respond to them? Acclaimed poet Peter Robinson brings his knowledge of poetic art to the understanding of the reader's contribution in enabling poetry to play its part in life. Emphasising the value of individual writers' and readers' interactions, together with such key matters as meter and rhythm, voicing and form, rhyme and syntax, Robinson shows how poems engage in speech performances such as promising, justifying, excusing, and explaining - including the telling of truths. Illustrated with detailed readings of poems by, among others, Jonson, Marvell, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Dickinson, Kipling, Basil Bunting, Frank O'Hara, Tony Harrison, and Denise Riley, this book shows how important poetry is as a means to do things with words and make things happen.

1. Sound sense
2. Reading techniques
3. Meter, rhythm, and rhyme
4. Forming voice, voicing form
5. Intelligence disabling
6. Sounding a subject
7. Burdens of sound
8. Keeping promises
9. Responding as uptake
10. A sense of poetry
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Poetry [DC]