Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

"What is Literature?" and Other Essays

by Jean-Paul Sartre

"What is Literature?" remains the most significant critical landmark of French literature since World War II. Neither abstract nor abstruse, it is a brilliant, provocative performance by a writer more inspired than cautious. "What is Literature?" challenges anyone who writes as if literature could be extricated from history or society. But Sartre does more than indict. He offers a definitive statement about... (more)

Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays

Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays

by Judith Farr

A truly useful collection of literary criticism on a widely studied author, this collection of essays, selected and introduced by a distinguished scholar, makes the most informative and provocative critical work easily available to the general public. KEY TOPICS: Offers volumes of the same excellence for the contemporary moment. Captures and makes accessible the most stimulating critical writing of our time on... (more)

A Room of One's Own

by Virginia Woolf

Originally published in 1929, A Room of One's Own eloquently states Woolf's conviction that in order to create works of genius, women must be freed from financial obligations and social restrictions.

Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot

by Frank Kermode, T. S. Eliot

Thirty-one essays-categorized as “essays in generalization,” “appreciations of individual authors,” and “social and religious criticism”- written over a half century. This volume reveals Eliot’s original ideas, cogent conclusions, and skill and grace in language. Edited and with an Introduction by Frank Kermode; Index. Published jointly with Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Poetry, Language, Thought

by Martin Heidegger

Essential reading for students and anyone interested in the great philosophers, this book opened up appreciation of Martin Heidegger beyond the confines of philosophy to the reaches of poetry. In Heidegger's thinking, poetry is not a mere amusement or form of culture but a force that opens up the realm of truth and brings man to the measure of his being and his world.

Aristotle's Poetics

by Hippocrates George Apostle, Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle

Introduced by Francis Fergusson, the Poetics , written in the fourth century B.C., is still an essential study of the art of drama, indeed the most fundamental one we have. It has been used by both playwrights and theorists of many periods, and interpreted, in the course of its two thousand years of life, in various ways. The literature which has accumulated around it is, as Mr. Fergusson points out, "full of... (more)

Essays of Four Decades

by Allen Tate

Allen Tate (1899-1979) was one of the twentieth century's most celebrated literary critics and poets. A founding member of the Fugitive poets and a contributor to the Southern Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand, Tate was a leading exponent of the New Criticism. In these essays, first collected in 1968, Tate reminds turn-of-the-century readers that the study of literature and poetry is a metaphysical undertaking... (more)

The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide

by Robert Pinsky

The Poet Laureate's clear and entertaining account of how poetry works. "Poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art," Robert Pinsky declares in The Sounds of Poetry . "The medium of poetry is the human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is as physical or bodily an art as dancing." As Poet Laureate, Pinsky is one of... (more)

The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

The Art of the Commonplace gathers twenty-one essays by Wendell Berry that offer an agrarian alternative to our dominant urban culture. These essays promote a clearly defined and compelling vision important to all people dissatisfied with the stress, anxiety, disease, and destructiveness of contemporary American culture. Why is agriculture becoming culturally irrelevant, and at what cost? What are the forces of... (more)

Walking Light

by Stephen Dunn

Commited to exploring the role of poetry and poets in our culture, Stephen Dunn provides a new, expanded edition of the essays originally published by W. W. Norton in 1993, now out of print. In Walking Light , Dunn plumbs the relationship between art and sport, the role of imagination in writing poetry, and emphasizes the need for surprise and discovery in a poem. "Your poem effectively begins, " he writes, "at... (more)

Standing by Words: Essays

by Wendell Berry

In these six essays, award-winning author Wendell Berry considers the degeneration of language that is manifest throughout our culture, from poetry to politics, from conversation to advertising, and he shows how the ever widening cleft between words and their referents mirrors the increasing isolation of individuals from their communities and of their communities from the land. From the essay, Standing by Words,... (more)

Poetry and Ambition: Essays 1982--88 (Poets on Poetry)Donald Hall

Poetry and Ambition: Essays 1982--88 (Poets on Poetry)

by Donald Hall

A compelling collection of essays on the state of contemporary poetry

Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry

Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry

by Dave Smith

In Hunting Men, poet Dave Smith reasserts the validity of poetry in our times. With eloquence, grace, and a searching intelligence, Smith illuminates both poems and poets. Believing that "great poetry cannot be divorced from an intimate, organic link to place," he builds a compelling case for the importance of southern poets. Like the hunters who taught Smith as a young man patience, observation, and willingness... (more)

LOCAL ASSAYSDave Smith

LOCAL ASSAYS

by Dave Smith

Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953-1976

by Richard Wilbur

Two-time Pulitzer-winner Wilbur remains America's reigning master of poems in traditional forms, creating flawless, balanced, charming and even profound couplets, sonnets, sapphics, and intricately custom-made stanzas. This first volume since the 1989 New and Selected brings together 22 new poems, six renderings of lyric poems from French, Romanian and Bulgarian, and two longer verse translations--from Moliere's... (more)

No Other Book: Selected Essays

by Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell was only fifty-one at the time of his death, in 1965, yet he created a body of work that secured his position as one of the century's leading American men of letters.Although he saw himself chiefly as a poet, publishing a number of books of poetry, he also left behind a sparkling comic novel, four children's books, numerous translations, haunting letters, and four collections of essays. Edited by... (more)

New and Selected EssaysRobert Penn Warren

New and Selected Essays

by Robert Penn Warren

These 13 magisterial literary essays, dating from 1942 to 1973, by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and novelist Warren, contain sevenon Coleridge, Conrad, Faulkner, Frost, Hemingway and Melvillethat were published in Selected Essays (1958). The other six pieces have not previously appeared in book form: studies of Hawthorne and hell-fire; Whittier's poetry as experience; the poetry of John Crowe Ransom; the complex... (more)

Essential Welty (Unabridged)

by Eudora Welty

"Stories, Essays, and Memoir" contains all of Welty's collected short stories, her first book, "A Curtain of Green and Other Stories" (1941), stories based on her travels, and the ever-popular memoir, "One Writer's Beginnings" (1984).

Death to the Death of Poetry: Essays, Reviews, Notes, Interviews (Poets on Poetry)

Death to the Death of Poetry: Essays, Reviews, Notes, Interviews (Poets on Poetry)

by Donald Hall

A spirited defense of the vitality of contemporary poetry.

Poetry and the Age by Randall JarrellRandall Jarrell

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: literary essays

by Jean-Paul Sartre

by Judith Farr

by Virginia Woolf

by Frank Kermode, T. S. Eliot

by Martin Heidegger

by Hippocrates George Apostle, Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle

by Allen Tate

by Robert Pinsky

by Wendell Berry

by Stephen Dunn

by Wendell Berry

by Donald Hall

by Dave Smith

by Dave Smith

by Richard Wilbur

by Randall Jarrell

by Robert Penn Warren

by Eudora Welty

by Donald Hall

by Randall Jarrell