A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

With specificity, clarity, and inspired insight, Hass (Times and Materials), a Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate, painstakingly dissects and analyzes poetic form. Hass’s reading is extensive, as shown by references to and quotations of dozens of poets, ranging in period from Caesar’s Rome to the Renaissance and 21st-century America. He includes the greats—Bashõ, Dickinson, Rudaki, Shakespeare—and a wealth of lesser-known talents. Hass discusses how poetic form synthesizes many subjects, including math, music, religion, and sexuality. Throughout, he justifies and asserts the place of order in poetic form, which is often accused of being chaotic and abstruse. The first fourth of the book alone is dedicated to the significance of line count. He instructs that a single line is whole, in addition to being “light and heavy”; that two lines introduce dependent relation and can be seen as an aspect of one; and that three lines, due to their lack of symmetrical relation, evoke mystery and infinitude. He also includes intriguing etymologies and translations, delineating the evolution of specific words, poems, and poetic forms. Hass has produced an emotionally and intellectually nurturing work of analysis, suited for academia and ambitious leisure readers. (Apr.) [em] [/em]