True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing

About this book

True-Love is the fulfillment of revered poet-critic Allen Grossmans long service to poetry in the interests of humanity. Poetrys singular mission is to bind love and truth togetherlove that desires the beloveds continued life knotted with the truth of lifes contingencyto help make us more present to each other. In the spirit of Blakes vow of mental fight Grossman contends with challenges to the validity of the poetic imagination from Adornos maxim No poetry after Auschwitz to the claims of religious authority upon truth and the ultimate challenge posed by the fact of death itself. To these challenges he responds with eloquent and rigorous arguments drawing on wide resources of learning and his experience as master-poet and teacher. Grossmans readings of Wordsworth Hart Crane Paul Celan and others focus on poems that interrogate the real or enact the hard bargains that literary representation demands. True-Love is destined to become an essential book wherever poetry and criticism sustain one another.