Stephen Spender

Alphabetically arranged account of poets and analyses of their poetry.

"Stephen Spender's Collected Poems is the first gathering together of this renowned poet's major work in more than thirty years. The book contains recent uncollected poems, including remembrances of Auden, Stravinsky, and Louis MacNeice, as well as previously uncollected early poems. Sir Stephen has also made considerable changes in the texts of his earlier work, eliminating some poems and significantly reworking many others. Stephen Spender is a signal figure in the history of poetry in English in our century. A poet of engagement, both political and emotional, he has witnessed and vividly described the traumas and trials of his age. This definitive collection of his poems is his essential testimony."--Back cover.

In the words of its editors, Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, The Making of a Poem "looks squarely at some of the headaches and mysteries of poetic form." Here, two of our foremost poets provide a lucid, straightforward anthology for those who have always felt that an understanding of form -- sonnet, ballad, villanelle, sestina, etc. -- would enhance their appreciation of poetry. By example and explanation, the anthology traces "the exuberant history of forms," a history that unites poets as manifold as John Keats and Joy Harjo (the Ode) or Geoffrey Chaucer and Jean Toomer (the Stanza). Each chapter is devoted to one form, offering explanation, close reading, and a rich selection of exemplars that amply demonstrate the power and possibility of the form. In the end, Strand and Boland write, "we hope that the reader will agree that these forms are -- as we believe -- not locks, but keys." In linking the expressive potential of a poem to its architecture of syllable and rhyme, this collection is as instructive for the novice as it is inspiring for the practiced poet. - Jacket flap.