"What is poetry and what is poetry for? To ask the first question is to ask the second. To answer both questions in light of the western tradition stretching back to Homer, and against much modernist and postmodernist poetic theory and practice, is the goal of James Matthew Wilson's remarkable new book, The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking. Beginning with a trenchant analysis of the deficiencies of contemporary poetry--free verse, the prose poem, and other innovations--Wilson demonstrates persuasively that far too many poets have rejected, or simply drifted away from, the necessary though not entirely sufficient definition of poetry by American poet J.V. Cunningham: 'It is metrical composition.'"--David Middleton, in The American Conservative. Includes bibliographical references.
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