Beginning with basic terminology and techniques, Mayes shows how focusing on one aspect of a poem can help you to better understand, appreciate, and enjoy the reading and writing experience.

Understanding James Dickey -- Into the stone and Drowning with others -- Helmets -- Buckdancer's choice -- Falling and The Eye-beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy -- Deliverance -- The Zodiac, The Strength of fields, and Puella -- Dickey as critic.

Robert Kirschten maintains that most formal analyses of Jams Dickey’s poetry have been unsatisfactory or at best only partially complete. Some critics have labeled Dickey an American romantic, while others have called him a mystic, a pantheist, a comic poet. In James Dickey and the Gentle Ecstasy of Earth, Kirschten provides a fuller understanding of Dickey’s lyric vision by employing what Ronald Crane calls “multiple working hypotheses.” The first three of these—mysticism, neoplatonism, and romanticism—serve primarily to align general traits in Dickey’s poetry with familiar literary traditions. The fourth of Kirschten’s hypotheses—primitivism—is drawn from the field of anthropology. Kirschten shows that such anthropological concepts as magic, rites of passage, and ritual violence are vital in describing Dickey’s central methods. After synthesizing the four hypotheses to establish a critical base, Kirschten investigates three crucial elements in Dickey’s poetry: his lyric speakers, central narrative devices, and poetic diction. The final chapter, in a culmination of the entire investigation, offers a reading of the long poem “The Shark’s Parlor.” Kirschten’s study reveals a sure grasp of the philosophical principles of literary criticism as well as a wide range of reading, especially in the literature of romanticism. This lucid examination gives us genuine new insights into the work of one of the country’s premier poets.

The second edition features twelve new poets as well as new work by Donald Justice, T. R. Hummer, Dave Smith, Pattiann Rogers, Andrew Hudgins, Henry Taylor, Gerald Barrax, Rodney Jones, and others. Among the new additions are Mark Jarman, Cathy Smith Bowers, and Charlie Smith. Many teachers realize that the best way to get their students to relate to poetry is to show them poems that contain landscapes and subjects they understand and can identify with. Leon Stokesbury has put together a richly varied collection used in classrooms not only in the South but all over the country as a means of studying the important influence of southern poetry on American literature. With the publication of the second edition of The Made Thing, Stokesbury has marked the end of the twentieth century and the rise to prominence of southern writers. This collection serves as a substantial sampling of poets whose works span more than five decades and who explore the rich personal and cultural history that extends beyond the boundaries of the South.

All the poems of a great 20th-century poet.

This book provides an introduction to the elements of poetry, formulates a series of contexts for the interpretation of poems, and offers a substantial anthology. Its purpose is to enable students to read poems with understanding and pleasure and to provide them with a basic vocabulary for analysing and talking about poems.

In the 40 essays that constitute this collection, Guy Davenport, one of America's major literary critics, elucidates a range of literary history, encompassing literature, art, philosophy and music, from the ancients to the grand old men of modernism.