How Poems Think

To write or read a poem is often to think in distinctively poetic ways--guided by metaphors, sound, rhythms, associative movement, and more. Poetry's stance toward language creates a particular intelligence of thought and feeling, a compressed articulation that expands inner experience, imagining with words what cannot always be imagined without them. Through translation, poetry has diversified poetic traditions, and some of poetry's ways of thinking begin in the ancient world and remain potent even now. In How Poems Think, Reginald Gibbons presents a rich gallery of poetic inventiveness and continuity drawn from a wide range of poets--Sappho, Pindar, Shakespeare, Keats, William Carlos Williams, Marina Tsvetaeva, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many others. Gibbons explores poetic temperament, rhyme, metonymy, etymology, and other elements of poetry as modes of thinking and feeling. In celebration and homage, Gibbons attunes us to the possibilities of poetic thinking.

Author: Reginald Gibbons
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 09/23/2015
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.40w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9780226278001
ISBN10: 022627800X
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Poetry
- Literary Criticism | European | General
- Literary Criticism | American | General

About the Author
Reginald Gibbons is the Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. His most recent poetry collections are Creatures of a Day, a finalist for the National Book Award; and Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems and Stories.