Poetry as Survival

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University of Georgia Press, 2002 - 235页
Intended for general readers and for students and scholars of poetry, Poetry as Survival is a complex and lucid analysis of the powerful role poetry can play in confronting, surviving, and transcending pain and suffering.

Gregory Orr draws from a generous array of sources. He weaves discussions of work by Keats, Dickinson, and Whitman with quotes from three-thousand-year-old Egyptian poems, Inuit songs, and Japanese love poems to show that writing personal lyric has helped poets throughout history to process emotional and experiential turmoil, from individual stress to collective grief. More specifically, he considers how the acts of writing, reading, and listening to lyric bring ordering powers to the chaos that surrounds us. Moving into more contemporary work, Orr looks at the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Stanley Kunitz, and Theodore Roethke, poets who relied on their own work to get through painful psychological experiences.

As a poet who has experienced considerable trauma--especially as a child--Orr refers to the damaging experiences of his past and to the role poetry played in his ability to recover and survive. His personal narrative makes all the more poignant and vivid Orr's claims for lyric poetry's power as a tool for healing. Poetry as Survival is a memorable and inspiring introduction to lyric poetry's capacity to help us find safety and comfort in a threatening world.

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INTRODUCTION Everywhere and Always
1
PART ONE The Self Jeopardy and Song
11
Poised on a Mountain Peak Floating on the Ocean
13
The Dinner Party and the Sailor at War
24
The Embodied Self
37
The Edge as Threshold
51
Bags Full of Havoc
59
The Two Survivals
83
IO Wordsworth and the Permanent Forms
141
Keats and the Ardor of the Pursuer
149
Whitman and the Habit of Dazzle
159
Dickinson and the Brains Haunted Corridors
171
Wilfred Owen and the Horrors of War
182
The Quest and the Dangerous Path
189
Constellations and Medicine Pouches
204
APPENDIX A Sacred and Secular Lyric
209

The Powers of Poetry
93
PART TWO Trauma and Transformation
115
The Dangerous Angel
117
Convulsive Transformation of the Overculture
133
APPENDIX B The Social Lyric and the Personal Lyric
213
Incarnating Eros
225
Index
231
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作者简介 (2002)

Gregory Orr is the author of such highly praised poetry collections as Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved and The Caged Owl as well as a memoir, The Blessing, which was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the fifty best nonfiction books of 2002. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship, and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2003 he was presented with the Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Orr is a professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1975 and where he was the founder and first director of its MFA in Writing program.

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