Robinson explains how poetry makes things happen through the interaction of its chosen words and forms with the reader's responses.

The Poet Laureate's clear and entertaining account of how poetry works. "Poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art," Robert Pinsky declares in The Sounds of Poetry. "The medium of poetry is the human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is as physical or bodily an art as dancing." As Poet Laureate, Pinsky is one of America's best spokesmen for poetry. In this fascinating book, he explains how poets use the "technology" of poetry--its sounds--to create works of art that are "performed" in us when we read them aloud. He devotes brief, informative chapters to accent and duration, syntax and line, like and unlike sounds, blank and free verse. He cites examples from the work of fifty different poets--from Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert to W. C. Williams, Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, C. K. Williams, Louise Glück, and Frank Bidart. This ideal introductory volume belongs in the library of every poet and student of poetry.

There is no better way for you to learn about poetry and to understand its elements than with PERRINE'S SOUND AND SENSE: AN INTRODUCTION TO POETRY. As both an introduction to poetry and an anthology, this classic best-seller succinctly covers the basics of poetry with detailed chapters on the elements of poetry (denotation and connotation, imagery, figurative language, allusion, tone, rhythm and meter, pattern, etc.), unique materials on evaluating poetry, exemplary selections, and exercises and study questions that help readers understand each selection. Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson have assiduously continued the Perrine tradition over several recent editions. Every chapter introduction in this compact and concise anthology bears the mark of Laurence Perrine's crisp, clean, and descriptive prose, and every poem selected as an example is a perfect illustration of the concept at hand. Whether you are a beginner or a more experienced reader of poems, you can profit from this book's step-by-step method for understanding how a poem does what it does. Suggestions for writing help students to sort out their feelings and ideas, enabling them to assist others in sharing their experience.

"What real role can poetry have in the world? How are its truths created by the words and sounds chosen by the poet and by the way readers respond to them? Acclaimed poet Peter Robinson brings his knowledge of poetic art to the understanding of the reader's contribution in enabling poetry to play its part in life"--

What real role can poetry have in the world? How are its truths created by the words and sounds chosen by the poet and by the way readers respond to them? Acclaimed poet Peter Robinson brings his knowledge of poetic art to the understanding of the reader's contribution in enabling poetry to play its part in life. Emphasising the value of individual writers' and readers' interactions, together with such key matters as meter and rhythm, voicing and form, rhyme and syntax, Robinson shows how poems engage in speech performances such as promising, justifying, excusing, and explaining - including the telling of truths. Illustrated with detailed readings of poems by, among others, Jonson, Marvell, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Dickinson, Kipling, Basil Bunting, Frank O'Hara, Tony Harrison, and Denise Riley, this book shows how important poetry is as a means to do things with words and make things happen.