"David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr’s a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-eyed, opinionated, and idiosyncratic guide to a vibrant but endangered art form, essential reading for anyone who loves poetry, and also for those of us who mostly just admire it from afar." —Tom Perrotta Award-winning New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr delivers an engaging, amusing, and stimulating tour through the world of poetry. With echoes of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless offers a smart and funny approach to appreciating an art form that many find difficult to embrace.

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The variety of contemporary American poetry leaves many readers overwhelmed. The critic, scholar, and poet Stephen Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s, where critical consensus ends, he presents 60 poems, each with an original essay explaining how the poem works, why it matters, and how it speaks to other parts of art and culture.

Guido Mazzoni tells the story of poetry's revolution in the modern age. The chief transformation was the rise of the lyric as it is now conceived: a genre in which a first-person speaker talks about itself. Mazzoni argues that modern poetry embodies the age of the individual and has wrought profound changes in the expectations of readers.

Collects one hundred poems from the past century that reflect modern culture, including works by William Butler Yeats, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, Wallace Stevens, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

More than perhaps any other folkloric tradition, whether oral or written, the myths of classical Greece and Rome have survived and pervaded the consciousness of lands far-flung from their source. The mythic world of the ancients, peopled by glamorous gods and unstoppable heroes, in which themortal and immortal commingled, is even now a living presence in 21st century culture, rather than a literary relic. Whether we know them by their Roman or their Greek names - Artemis or Minerva, Poseidon or Neptune - the figures of these ancietn myths captured the imagination of culture afterculture across the globe, inspiring writers, artists, musicians and those of us who comprise the audience for their works. Can it be a coincidence that the greatest poets of the western world have each at one point tried their hand at retellings?Kossman's anthology assembles some of the best of these poems inspired by ancient myths, organizing them by themse, and allowing the reader to compare one against the other - for example, one section assembels poems telling the stories of mythic lovers (Cupid and Psyche, Orpheus and Eurydice);another the many tales of miraculous transformations (Pygmalion and Galatea, Echo and Narcissus). With such a wide variety of the world's best poets to choose from - from all over the world and from any era since classical times - Kossman has had no difficulty creating a literary pantheon; includedare D. H. Lawrence, Derek Walcott, Rita Dove, Denise Levertov, Rilke, Pound, and Yeats. The collection should be a treasure for the innumerable debotees of both myth and poetry.