The Long Schoolroom: Lessons in the Bitter Logic of the Poetic Principle (Poets on Poetry)
by Allen Grossman
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Allen Grossman's combined reputation as a poet and as a professor of poetry gives him an unusual importance in the landscape of contemporary American poetry. In this new collection Grossman revisits the "Long Schoolroom" of poetic principle--where he eventually learned to reconsider the notion that poetry was cultural work of the kind that contributed unambiguously to the peace of the world. The jist of what he learned--of what his "lessons" taught him--was (in the sentence of Oliver Wendell show more Holmes): "Where most men have died, there is the greatest interest." According to Grossman, violence arises not merely from the "barbarian" outside of the culture the poet serves, but from the inner logic of that culture; not, as he would now say, from the defeat of cultural membership but from the terms of cultural membership itself. Grossman analyzes the "bitter logic of the poetic principle" as it is articulated in exemplary texts and figures, including Bede's Caedmon and Milton. But the heart of The Long Schoolroom is American, ranging from essays on Whitman and Lincoln to an in-depth review of the work of Hart Crane. His final essays probe the example of postmodern Jewish and Christian poetry in this country, most notably the work of Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsburg, as it searches for an understanding of "holiness" in the production and control of violence. Allen Grossman is author of The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New and Selected, The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers (with Mark Halliday), and most recently, The Philosopher's Window. He is Mellon Professor in the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. show lessTags
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Allen Grossman was born in 1932 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He received a B.A. and a M.A. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Brandeis University. He taught at Brandeis University for 35 years before moving to Johns Hopkins University, where he taught from 1991 until his retirement in 2006. His collections of poetry include The Ether Dome and show more Descartes' Loneliness. He received numerous awards during his lifetime including three Pushcart Prizes, the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize in Poetry of Wellesley College, the Sheaffer-PEN/Nex England Award for Literary Distinction, and Yale University's Bollingen Prize. He died of complications from Alzheimer's on June 27, 2014 at the age of 82. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, Literature Studies and Criticism, Poetry
- DDC/MDS
- 811.009 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American poetry Specific kinds of poetry {only by more than one author} Modified standard subdivisions History, description, critical appraisal of American poetry
- LCC
- PS3557 .R67 .Z47 — Language and Literature American literature American literature Individual authors 1961-
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- Languages
- English
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- ISBNs
- 2
