The Dangers of Poetry
The Dangers of Poetry

Author: Kevin M. Jones

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1503613879

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Poetry has long dominated the cultural landscape of modern Iraq, simultaneously representing the literary pinnacle of high culture and giving voice to the popular discourses of mass culture. As the favored genre of culture expression for religious clerics, nationalist politicians, leftist dissidents, and avant-garde intellectuals, poetry critically shaped the social, political, and cultural debates that consumed the Iraqi public sphere in the twentieth century. The popularity of poetry in modern Iraq, however, made it a dangerous practice that carried serious political consequences and grave risks to dissident poets. The Dangers of Poetry is the first book to narrate the social history of poetry in the modern Middle East. Moving beyond the analysis of poems as literary and intellectual texts, Kevin M. Jones shows how poems functioned as social acts that critically shaped the cultural politics of revolutionary Iraq. He narrates the history of three generations of Iraqi poets who navigated the fraught relationship between culture and politics in pursuit of their own ambitions and agendas. Through this historical analysis of thousands of poems published in newspapers, recited in popular demonstrations, and disseminated in secret whispers, this book reveals the overlooked contribution of these poets to the spirit of rebellion in modern Iraq.

Making Something Happen
Making Something Happen

Author: Michael Thurston

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2003-01-14

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 0807875007

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Poetry makes nothing happen," wrote W. H. Auden in 1939, expressing a belief that came to dominate American literary institutions in the late 1940s--the idea that good poetry cannot, and should not, be politically engaged. By contrast, Michael Thurston here looks back to the 1920s and 1930s to a generation of poets who wrote with the precise hope and the deep conviction that they would move their audiences to action. He offers an engaging new look at the political poetry of Edwin Rolfe, Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, and Muriel Rukeyser. Thurston combines close textual reading of the poems with research into their historical context to reveal how these four poets deployed the resources of tradition and experimentation to contest and redefine political common sense. In the process, he demonstrates that the aesthetic censure under which much partisan writing has labored needs dramatic revision. Although each of these poets worked with different forms and toward different ends, Thurston shows that their strategies succeed as poetry. He argues that partisan poetry demands reflection not only on how we evaluate poems but also on what we value in poems and, therefore, which poems we elevate.

Whitman the Political Poet
Whitman the Political Poet

Author: Betsy Erkkila

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0195113802

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Erkkila's aim is to repair the split between the private and the public, the personal and the political and the poet and the history that has governed the analysis and evaluation of Whitman and his work in the past.

Byron: The Poetry of Politics and the Politics of Poetry
Byron: The Poetry of Politics and the Politics of Poetry

Author: Roderick Beaton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07-01

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1317170296

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'It is no great matter, supposing that Italy could be liberated, who or what is sacrificed. It is a grand object - the very poetry of politics. Only think - a free Italy!!! Why, there has been nothing like it since the days of Augustus.' So wrote Lord Byron in his journal, in February 1821, only days before the outbreak of revolution in Greece, where three years later he would die in the service of the revolutionary cause. For a poet whose life and work are interlaced with action of multiple sorts, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to Byron's engagement with issues of politics. This volume brings together the work of eminent Byronists from seven European countries and the USA to re-assess the evidence. What did Byron mean by the 'poetry of politics'? Was he, in any sense, a 'political animal'? Can his final, fateful involvement in Greece be understood as the culmination of earlier, more deeply rooted quests? The first part of the book examines the implications of reading and writing as themselves political acts; the second interrogates the politics inherent or implied in Byron's poems and plays; the third follows the trajectory of his political engagement (or non-engagement), from his abortive early career in the British House of Lords, via the Peninsular War in Spain to his involvement in revolutionary politics abroad.

On Poetry and Politics
On Poetry and Politics

Author: Jean Paulhan

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 0252032802

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The first English translation of Jean Paulhan's major essays

Poetry and Politics in the Modern Arab World
Poetry and Politics in the Modern Arab World

Author: Atef Alshaer

Publisher: Hurst & Company

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781849043199

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Alshaer's book offers a subtle and historically grounded reading of modern Arabic poetry, emphasising the aesthetic integration of politics within poetic form.