A little book on form: an exploration into the formal imagination of poetry

Description

An acute and deeply insightful book of essays exploring poetic form and the role of instinct and imagination within form--from former poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Robert Hass.Robert Hass--former poet laureate, winner of the National Book Award, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize--illuminates the formal impulses that underlie great poetry in this sophisticated, graceful, and accessible volume of essays drawn from a series of lectures he delivered at the renowned Iowa Writers' Workshop.A Little Book on Form brilliantly synthesizes Hass's formidable gifts as both a poet and a critic and reflects his profound education in the art of poetry. Starting with the exploration of a single line as the basic gesture of a poem, and moving into an examination of the essential expressive gestures that exist inside forms, Hass goes beyond approaching form as a set of traditional rules that precede composition, and instead offers...