Praises and Dispraises: Poetry and Politics, the 20th Century

by Terrence Des Pres

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670804061
• ISBN13: 9780670804061
• Release Date: August 1988
• Publisher: Viking
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 1.0" x 1.0"

Customer Reviews

Where Have All the Poets Gone....?

I could not agree more with Ms. Green's review and Des Pres' call for the return of the political in the personal and vice versa in the work of poets. Contemporary American poets to some degree sell out their talent and passion. Some of the best known poets have great PR agents (! ) and they want their flowers and accolades now, not later--that is their wont, I suppose. But, if there is wholesale hatred and murder and inhumanity any where on planet earth, there is wholesale hatred and murder and inhumanity EVERYwhere on planet earth...and poets give not only a voice, but a face, an emotion, and a truth that we can feel more than the speediness and the overreaching of images and 'Meet the Press' style posturings in today's media...Perhaps poets are inspired more if they see the wholesale hatred and murder and inhumanity firsthand...Des Pres' book have several excellent sections of biography and history and critique so well enmeshed so well that I find it stunning that the book is not considered for another pressing. Two of the especially well executed sections here are the one of Yeats and the rat rhymers (travelling troubadour-like bards and recitators--who does that sound like in today's time?) and of the great Bertold Brecht poetry from the 'dark times' of 1920's-1940's Germany--of which many of those years he was in exile. Where are the Greats, now? Does the situation has to arise to create them? Or are they somehow born with the talent and are producing the work and we have yet to discover them, en masse? These questions I truly cannot answer, but, again, in allusion to what I wrote above, a motor vehicle commercial proudly has the rhyme and voice of Dr. Sonia Sanchez...

An important book about the role of the poet

Starting with a demonstration of how politics destructively invades the life of the individual in Sophocles' play Antigone, Des Pres goes on to show how personal and political intermix in the poetry of William Butler Yeats, Bertold Brecht, Breyten Breytenbach, Thomas McGrath, and Adrienne Rich. Des Pres calls for a renewal of American poetics through a renewal of its political commitment to witness and to speak for and against. It's a shame this book is currently out of print.