In the vast diversity of Western civilization, poetry has traditions both national and international that span three millennia. To write a coherent critical history of even just lyric poetry would be perhaps beyond human powers, by in his essays Lowry Nelson finds it possible to take soundings--in great epochs of inventiveness and of changing sensibility; in the extremes of expressivity; in the reader's varying fictive role--while setting in appropriate contexts works of such poets as Horace, the early Troubadors, St. John of the Cross, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Leopardi, Baudelaire, and...
In the vast diversity of Western civilization, poetry has traditions both national and international that span three millennia. To write a coherent...
