The Didactic Muse Scenes of Instruction in Contemporary American Poetry - Spiegelman, Willard (Princeton University Press, 2014)
Acknowledgments ; ONE ; Introduction: W.H. Auden's ""New Year Letter""; TWO ; The Tempered Tone of Howard Nemerov; THREE ; The Moral Imperative in Anthony Hecht, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Pinsky; FOUR ; Myths of Concretion, Myths of Abstraction: The Case of A.R. Ammons; FIVE ; ""Driving to the Limits of the City of Words"": The Poetry of Adrienne Rich; SIX ; The Sacred Books of James Merrill; SEVEN ; Some Speculations in Place of a Conclusion; Notes; Index
Writing with the vigor and elan that readers have come to expect from his many astute reviews and essays, Willard Spiegelman maintains that contemporary American poets have returned to the poetic aims of an earlier era: to edify, as well as to delight, and thus to serve the ""didactic muse."" What Spiegelman says about individual poets--such as Nemerov, Hecht, Ginsberg, Pinsky, Ammons, Rich, and Merrill, among others--is wonderfully insightful. Furthermore, his outlook on their work--the way he takes quite literally the teacherly elements of their poems--challenges long-standing conceptions