Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950 (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

About this book

The historical writings that helped shape our current understandings of poetry. Toward the Open Field brings together many of the great prose piecesessays letters declarations defenses manifestos and apologiaby the most influential European and American poets from the Romantics to the Symbolists Surrealists and Moderns. Hitherto uncollected and all in English the work in this anthology follows the changing notions of what a poem is what a poet is and why we read a poem tracing the development of stylistic and ideological strategies that have spawned our current conflicting understandings of verse. The book begins with Wordsworths 1802 "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads and proceeds through 150 years of English language tradition including the European poetries which greatly influenced it. These prose works allow the reader to share one of the great extended conversations by poets about poetry during a dynamic period of literary experimentation. Includes work by Charles Baudelaire Andr Breton Aim Csaire Samuel Taylor Coleridge Emily Dickinson T.S. Eliot Ralph Waldo Emerson Gerard Manley Hopkins Langston Hughes John Keats Federico Garcia Lorca Mina Loy Stphane Mallarm Marianne Moore Charles Olson Ezra Pound Arthur Rimbaud Percy Bysshe Shelley Gertrude Stein Wallace Stevens Paul Valry Walt Whitman William Carlos Williams William Wordsworth and Louis Zukofsky.