Details
Synopsis
Camille Paglia homes in on 43 poems with detailed and enthusiastic commentary. Poets included range from Shakespeare to Lowell, from John Donne to Jean Toomer, and the poems Paglia chooses are not always what one would expect--nor are her judgments: she judges Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" as the single greatest poem of the 20th century, and defends Sylvia Plath's father against the accusations in "Daddy." As she says in her introduction, Paglia aims "to write concise commentaries on poetry that illuminate the text but also give pleasure in themselves as pieces of writing."
| Size | | Length: | 247 pages | | Height: | 8.5 in | | Width: | 5.8 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 16.0 oz |
Industry Reviews
"Cultural guru and academic prophet Paglia offers a series of close, brief, and beautifully lucid readings of 43 poems, all written in English and most squarely within the canon....An indisputably terrific primer for all students of literature in English."
Kirkus (01/15/2005)
"This book is the latest shot in [Paglia's] campaign to save culture from theory. It thus squares well with another of her aims, to rescue feminism from its unwise ideological allegiances. So in the first instance BREAK, BLOW, BURN is about poetry, and in the second it is about Camille Paglia....From this book you could doubt several aspects of her taste in poetry. But you couldn't doubt her love of it. She is humble enough to be enthralled by it; enthralled enough to be inspired; and inspired enough to write the sinuous and finely shaded prose that proves how a single poem can get the whole of her attention....I she doesn't make a poem sound like something dangerous, at least she makes it sound like something complicated. Students grown wary of pabulum might relish the nitty-gritty."
New York Times Book Review - Clive James (03/27/2005)
"[T]hough not all of the forty-three poems discussed in this volume are among the 'world's best,' the reader is confident that they really are Paglia's favorites, and grateful that she is generally lucid, diligent, and entertaining in justifying her taste....Is sincerity a substitute for good taste? Of course not, but that is rather beside the point: Paglia's taste is often very good, so her missteps are easily forgiven....These essays, which are structured like classroom lectures, are aimed at the common reader. At their best, they make a good model for any amateur reader of the personal but rigorous way in which a text should be explicated."
New Criterion - Stefan Beck (04/01/2005)
"[T]hough not all of the forty-three poems discussed in this volume are among the 'world's best,' the reader is confident that they really are Paglia's favorites, and grateful that she is generally lucid, diligent, and entertaining in justifying her taste....Is sincerity a substitute for good taste? Of course not, but that is rather beside the point: Paglia's taste is often very good, so her missteps are easily forgiven....These essays, which are structured like classroom lectures, are aimed at the common reader. At their best, they make a good model for any amateur reader of the personal but rigorous way in which a text should be explicated."
(04/01/2005)
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