John Hollander; poet and scholar; was a master whose work joined luminous learning and imaginative risk. This book; based on the unpublished Clark Lectures Hollander delivered in 1999 at Cambridge University; witnesses his power to shift the horizons of our thinking; as he traces the history of shadow in British and American poetry from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century.Shadow shows itself here in myriad literary identities; revealing its force as a way of seeing and a form of knowing; as material for fable and parable. Taking up a vast range of textsmdash;from the Bible; Dante; Shakespeare; and Milton to Poe; Dickinson; Eliot; and Stevensmdash;Hollander describes how metaphors of shadow influence our ideas of dreaming; desire; doubt; and death. These shadows of poetry and prose fiction point to unknown; often fearful domains of human experience; showing us concealed shapes of truth and possibility. Crucially; Hollander explores how shadows in poetic history become things with a strange substance and life of their own: they acquire the power to console; haunt; stalk; wander; threaten; command; and destroy. Shadow speaks; even sings; revealing to us the lost as much as the hidden self.An extraordinary blend of literary analysis and speculative thought; Hollanderrsquo;s account of the substance of shadow lays bare the substance of poetry itself.
#1225453 in eBooks 2016-05-13 2016-05-13File Name: B01FMKS1V2
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