Camille Paglia

Celebrates the great poetry of the Western tradition, looking at diverse works by poets ranging from Shakespeare and Dickinson to Plath, Hughes, and other unconventional poets.

Break, Blow, Burn

Emmett

Camille Paglia makes a convincing case that anyone can (learn to) read poetry and appreciate their beauty, and even song lyrics from pop culture can attain that laurel. This lucid and entertaining anthology of poetry and criticism is a showcase of that. It is loosely chronological, progressing from Shakespeare to Blake to the Romantics, after which her sampler of Modernism takes an American turn, selecting Wallace Stevens and Theodore Roethke over T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (William Carlos Williams is her Imagist, and a far finer one, too). One drawback is that her prejudices for Jungian and Freudian thought show, and not always convincingly. Though I am sure that because of her intellectual influences she would argue otherwise, sex isn't everywhere and implicit in every poem, and how one make take it depends both on the tropes of literary canon as well as the context in which they present itself, which renders in this reader's view some of her interpretations illegitimate. ... Although Paglia remains always interesting: decisive, expressive, wry, very observant. Her prose a mix of heavy-handedness and graceful turns of phrase. It mirrors an essay one would encounter in an English Literature class written by an intellectually mature and very knowledgeable adult, and consequently entices this reader with the image of ordinary working adults everywhere reading, learning and loving and talking about art. Many of these poems would not ordinarily be counted among 'the world's greatest', but she convincingly makes the case for their appreciation and, in this reader, a curiosity for the poet's other works. In the last essay on Joni Mitchell's 'Woodstock', one senses Paglia's generous sensitivity with which she encounters a piece of creative work when she moves from the lyrical content to the observation that song lyrics rarely present themselves well on the page (-cough- publishers are you listening?), and observes the poetic nature of 'Woodstock' on the contrary. She is willing to walk where the poems lead, and if only she does it more often, but for our times, this is more than enough.

Readings/poems of note - 'Woodstock' (Joni Mitchell), 'Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers' (Emily Dickinson), 'Jazzonia' (Langston Hughes), 'Cuttings', 'Root Cellar' (Theodore Roethke), 'This is Just to Say' (William Carlos Williams), 'Anecdote of the Jar' (Wallace Stevens), 'The Second Coming', 'Leda and the Swan' (W.B. Yeats)

Break, Blow, Burn

Reviews