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.

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

About the Author
Peter Robinson is a poet, novelist and literary critic. Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading, and poetry editor for Two Rivers Press, he has won the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize, and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations for his own work and his translations, mostly from the Italian.


Book Information
ISBN 9781108422963
Author Peter Robinson
Format Hardback
Page Count 238
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 480g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 157mm * 17mm