num_pages: 273
description: A thrillingly original exploration of a life lived under poetrys uniquely seductive spell.Oh! There are spirits of the air! wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley. In this stunningly original book Maureen N. McLane channels the spirits and voices that make up the music in one poets mind. Weaving criticism and memoir My Poets explores a life reading and a life read. McLane invokes in My Poets not necessarily the best poets nor the most important poets (whoever these might be) but those writers who in possessing her made her. I am marking here what most marked me she writes. Ranging from Chaucer to H. D. to William Carlos Williams to Louise Glck to Shelley (among others) McLane tracks the growth of a poets mind as Wordsworth put it in The Prelude. In a poetical prose both probing and incantatory McLane has written a radical book of experimental criticism. Susan Sontag called for an erotics of interpretation: this is it. Part Bildung part dithyramb part exegesis My Poets extends an implicit invitation to you dear reader to consider who your my poets or my novelists or my filmmakers or my pop stars might be.
language: English
title: My Poets
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux