The Flexible Lyric

Ellen Bryant Voigt

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These nine eloquent and skillfully crafted essays by a distinguished poet examine the art of lyric poetry in all aspects of its design and structure. Through attentive readings of a variety of artists, including her contemporaries, Ellen Bryant Voigt celebrates the structure and elasticity of lyric poems. She argues for reading as a writer reads--with equal parts passion and analysis. Her analyses of the effects of tone, image, voice, and structure connect brilliant theory with tangible examples.

Intimate as well as informative, the collection begins with a discussion of the creative process and Voigt's fascination with the writing of Flannery O'Connor and Elizabeth Bishop. Readings of lyric poems by Shakespeare, Sidney, Poe, Stevens, Williams, Larkin, Bogan, Roethke, Plath, Levertov, Berryman, and others demonstrate the roles of gender, point of view, image, and music in poetry. An experienced teacher, Voigt focuses on the lyric but encourages, in any study of poetry, original thinking, attention to structure, and, above all, close reading of the work itself. An intelligent and thought-provoking marriage of art and scholarship, The Flexible Lyric exemplifies, with fierceness, dedication, and precision, how the making of poems is not just a trade but a calling.

Book Details

Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Publish Date: Nov 30th, 1999
Pages: 234
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.28in - 5.58in - 1.03in - 0.66lb
EAN: 9780820321318
Categories: • Poetry• General

About the Author

Voigt, Ellen Bryant: - ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT is a widely honored poet and the author of five books of poems. She is also a creative writing teacher and has had a long association with the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Vermont.

Praise for this book

[Voigt's] poems are tantalizing, supremely crafted, sublime. Voigt has explored refinements of feeling that most people overlook and delineated these feelings with a hand as deft as Rembrandt's.

--San Francisco Chronicle, on Ellen Bryant Voigt

Because she possesses a lyric voice as fine as any we have in American poetry today, [her] poems have something of the quality of music, an understated fugue we follow into darkness.

--Shenandoah, on Ellen Bryant Voigt

These eloquent essays celebrate the art and craft of lyric poetry, passionately and astutely revisiting the work of poets from Shakespeare to Bishop. The book is an inspired argument, proving that the making of poems is not just a trade but a calling.

--Ploughshares

A passionate defense of the richness, variety, and ambition of the lyric mode . . . it's a celebration of poetic virtues.

--Atlantic Unbound

The Flexible Lyric is a splendid book of essays on lyric poetry by one of our most acute poetic thinkers.

--Edward Hirsch "author of How to Read a Poem"

Sober and very bright, conveying a great sense of respect for the art, The Flexible Lyric exhibits many of the same qualities that it so aptly examines and admires in poetry.

--Dean Young "author of Strike Anywhere"

Since Randall Jarrell, poets have bemoaned the lack of a true poet-critic, a sensibility both commonsensical, laconic, and appropriately imaginative. Now we have Ellen Bryant Voigt, who offers Jarrell's combination of wit and gravity--as well as his critical urgency in choosing subjects of scrutiny. What Ellen Bryant Voigt says here needs to be said--the reader finds relief as she sorts out the vexed questions of gender, genre, and form--using the lyric itself as her source of inquiry. These pages are filled with insights that make The Flexible Lyric a classic--timeless, unbiased, brilliant.

--Carol Muske "author of An Octave Above Thunder: New and Selected Poems"