Publisher's Synopsis
This book attempts to develop a generative criticism of poetic practice. The order of presentation follows a certain model for how the poem comes into being. Poetic practice as it is actualized in the work of the creative imagination stems from: memory as the place where the poem arises among the conflicts of the imagination; absence or the loss which weighs on the utterance and gives it urgency; desire as the force structuring the poem according to the subject's need; knowing or how the subject's experience of the world and other people finds expression; and style or how the poem exemplifies a compassionate understanding. Poets whose work is examined include Hardy, Mallarme, Williams, Ungaretti, Apollinaire, Saint-John Perse, John Ashbery, and Frank O'Hara.
