To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry

by W. D. Snodgrass

Overview

In his first collection of essays on poetry in 27 years, W.D. Snodgrass goes after that seminal quality, the poet’s individual voice, that separates the best poetry from the merely technical and pedantic. Beginning with an essay on the poetic impulse, and continuing through prosody and musicality, Snodgrass gives us an essential handbook for poets and poetry readers.

Responsible for the emergence of American confessional poetry, W.D. Snodgrass won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his first book, Heart’s Needle. He lives with his wife, critic and translator Kathleen Snodgrass, in Erieville, New York, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781929918188
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	10/01/2002
Series:	American Readers Series , #5
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

W. D. Snodgrass is author of over twenty books of poetry, two books of literary criticism, and six volumes of translation. Honors include an Ingram Merrill Foundation award, Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, Ford Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and National Endownment for the Arts. He retired from teaching in 1994.

Table of Contents

	Pulse and Impulse
I.	Good Gray Poets and Great Horned Owls	11
II.	Apple Trees and Belly Dancers	20
	Against Your Beliefs	31
	Shapes Merging and Emerging	51
	Disgracing Are Verse: Sense, Censors, Nonsense and Extrasensory Deceptions	77
I.	Codes, Hums and Puns	77
II.	The High Art of Mistranslation	91
III.	Dialects, Babblings, Styles	110
	Whitman's Selfsong	131
I.	Dilemma and Doctrine	131
II.	Structure	140
III.	Synergy and Syntactics	149
IV.	Line and Rhythm	157
V.	Conclusions	170
	Meter, Music, Meaning	173
I.	Rhythms in Stress Meter	176
II.	Rhythms in Syllabic Meter	196
III.	Rhythms in Syllabic-Stress Meter	206
	Acknowledgments	233
	About the Author	235
	Index	236
	Colophon	244

Editorial Reviews

Showing how one can work from "Pulse and Impulse," "Shapes Merging and Emerging" and even "Against Your Beliefs," poet W.D. Snodgrass offers a series of well-tempered how-tos in To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry. Snodgrass, whose Pulitzer Priz -winning Hearts Needle (1960) remains influential, gives prosodic examples from Whitman, shows how to add just the right amount of acid to parody and gives sound advice on all sorts of syllabic manipulations.

From the Publisher

Showing how one can work from "Pulse and Impulse," "Shapes Merging and Emerging" and even "Against Your Beliefs," poet W.D. Snodgrass offers a series of well-tempered how-tos in To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry. Snodgrass, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Hearts Needle (1960) remains influential, gives prosodic examples from Whitman, shows how to add just the right amount of acid to parody and gives sound advice on all sorts of syllabic manipulations. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Two new entries in the recent spate of books about poetry delve into that elusive concept, the poet's voice. In To Sound Like Yourself, The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Snodgrass offers six lengthy essays examining wordplay, musicality, and other elements that contribute to a distinctive voice. He includes lively descriptions of his own sources of inspiration-owls and belly dancers among them-as well as analysis of other poets, from Whitman to Wordsworth. At times, his complex evaluations seem culled from a graduate-level literature course, assuming familiarity with lesser-known writers, a grasp of music notation, and training in other languages. In Coming of Age as a Poet, Vendler, a renowned poetry critic and author, chooses one breakthrough poem by each of four poets-Milton, Keats, Eliot, and Plath. Through close readings of their structure, imagery, and scansion, she shows how these poems mark each poet's mastery of a unique voice. Three of the four chapters are based on lectures given at the University of Aberdeen. The clarity and expert analysis of all four poems could engage even a casual reader, while the breadth of scholarship and unique interpretations will appeal to more experienced poetry readers. Vendler's work is highly recommended for public and academic libraries, while Snodgrass's work is more appropriate for large university libraries.-Vivian Reed, California State Univ., Long Beach Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

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