(DOWNLOAD) "Poetry and Biography (Critical Essay)" by Northwest Review # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free

July 23, 2021

eBook details

Title: Poetry and Biography (Critical Essay)
Author : Northwest Review
Release Date : January 01, 2011
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 49 KB

Description

Because it derives from song and remains allied with it, poetry is antithetical to prose, or at least I hope it is, and biography and autobiography are traditionally prose forms. Poetry's biggest limitation and greatest virtue relative to prose is that it cannot bear very much reality, which I am using at the moment to mean exposition, and exposition is the very stuff of biography and autobiography. They exist to tell us the backstory--how I got to be here and who I am. Prose is because--and there is nothing like the word because, either stated or implied, to transform, magically, gold into dross, poetry into prose. Or perhaps it's not so much because itself as all the words inevitably following it that perform that feat of reverse alchemy. I don't mean just by the way the sludge of ensuing words attenuates rhythm. It goes deeper than that. Prose depends on the loving accretion of detail to build a world. We readers are provided with many planks and bricks to use as we build in our heads a simulacrum of the author's vision. We get--and we welcome--the illusion of reality that all those details permit.