Dickinson's Nerves, Frost's Woods

May 14, 2018
This book of essays from poet and critic Logan (Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure) strains to resituate famous poems. Revisiting and critiquing the arguments of mid-20th-century new criticism, Logan claims that focusing solely on poetry’s artistry “amounts to willful neglect” of its history, thereby justifying his own “historical-biographical-archeological” method. Logan’s chapter titles suggest the unexpected friction produced by pairing singular poems. In the essay “Shelley’s Wrinkled Lip, Smith’s Giant Leg,” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s masterpiece “Ozymandias” is compared with his contemporary and rival Horace Smith’s poem of the same title, which also describes a ruined, ancient statue (specifically, a “gigantic leg”) in a desert. The less-than-revelatory insight offered is that Shelley’s poem is better because “a disembodied granite arm has pathos, a granite leg nothing but bathos.” Elsewhere, Logan lists a “roll call of influence” that Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams may have encountered when composing their respective short imagist poems, “In a Station of the Metro” and “The Red Wheelbarrow.” While the accrual of potential influences is intriguing, it buries the poems in discordant, hypothetical data. Longtime poetry readers may find Logan’s selections overly familiar, while newcomers will find his academic references forbidding, leaving it unclear which group Logan hopes to reach.

Starred review from May 1, 2018

Logan (Alumni Professor and Distinguished Teaching Scholar, Univ. of Florida), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award (for The Undiscovered Country), should be declared a national treasure. One of our greatest living critics, he is also one of our sanest; but it is his curiosity that is his finest gift. Here he takes readers by the hand as he explores and contemplates the intricacies of syntax, meter, and imagery with the delicacy of a surgeon and the compassion of a monk. Whether structural, historical, or biographical, no detail is too small for his attention and care. Reading this book, one learns how to listen carefully, notice details, and ask discerning questions. Read his coda of the chapter on Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" and William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow" and you will learn not only a lesson about art and memory but also humility and humanity. Each chapter contrasts two poets (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow & Lewis Carroll, John Keats & Donald Justice, Emily Dickinson & Robert Frost, etc.) and overflows (at times) with insights and delightful digressions that are guaranteed to inspire literary scholars for generations. VERDICT Highly recommended for academic and poetry collections.--Herman Sutter, St. Agnes Acad., Houston

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.