Why Poetry Matters by Jay Parini

Why Poetry Matters

by Jay Parini

A Caravan Book, Yale University Press, 2008
First edition
Deckled edges
ISBN 9780300124231
Hardcover, dustjacket

Condition: Very Good
minor edge and shelf wear with minor rubbing and bumping to corners and covers, ex-lib with stamps to endpapers and stickers to back endpapers, tape residue on covers.  Dustjacket shows a little crumpling and chipping (see photographs)

“Drawing on a wide range of poets and writers and a forty-year habit of reading poetry daily, Parini turns to poetry for a respite form our clamorous culture.  Ever since Plato urged that they be kicked out of his ideal republic, poets have been on the run.  Parini looks at the traditional defences of poetry written over the centuries, from ancient times to the present.  Wearing his learning lightly, he wrestles with Plato, Horace, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Eliot, Frost, Stevens and beyond to such contemporaries as Adrienne Rich, Seamus Heaney, Charles Wright, and Mary Oliver.”