Susan Stewart is the Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and a MacArthur Fellow. She is the author of three books of poems, most recently The Forest, as well as many works of literary and art criticism, including On Longing and Crimes of Writing.
"The historical body of poetic forms is more and more an archive of lost sensual experiences the sound of wind in uninhabited spaces; the weight of ripe things not yet harvested." In Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, poet and critic Susan Stewart (On Longing) tracks poetry's sensual engagements, drawing on a truly incredible number of classical and modern canonical texts to show how poetry constructs its peculiar phenomenologies. (Jan.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Stewart, a poet, professor, and MacArthur Fellow, ambitiously traces "the path of the aesthetic in search of an explanation for the role of poetry in our culture." In a book much like Burke's On the Sublime or Kant's Observations on the Sublime, Stewart tacks from darkness and grief to sound, poetic voice, lyric possession, the deictic now (measure and time), and the nocturne. She contends that poetry "makes tangible, visible, and audible the contours of our shared humanity," that it "sustains and transforms the threshold between individual and social existence." Drawing from many examples of poetry, from the ancient Greeks to the postmoderns, she explores the interplay between somatic apprehensions (sound, listening, touch, vertigo) and formal orders. Both physically and poetically big, this book is recommended for those studying the metaphysics of poetry. Scott Hightower, Fordham Univ., New York Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
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