Poetry and Poetics

PRIMARY SOURCES

Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.

Aristotle. On Poetics. Translated by Seth Benardete and Michael Davis. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine's Press, 2002. An updated and accurate translation, with useful notes on details of Greek terminology and syntax.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism." In Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 116–200. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1996.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays. Translated by Lydia Davis. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981.

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Jakobson, Roman. "Linguistics and Poetics." In Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, 350–377. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960.

Plato. Republic. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford.: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Schlegel, Friedrich. "Critical Fragments." In Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, edited by Jochen Schulte-Sasse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Wimsatt, W. K. Jr. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954. Features two preliminary essays coauthored with M. C. Beardsley.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975. A critical survey of contemporary poetic theories.

De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. Features exemplary deconstructive and rhetorical readings.

DoleΩel, Lubomír. Occidental Poetics: Tradition and Progress. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Discusses contemporary poetic theories in relation to the broader history of philosophy, linguistics, and semiotics.

Leitch, Vincent et al. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001. A comprehensive selection of primary texts from antiquity to the modern day, with brief informative essays introducing each author.

Preminger, Alex, and T. V. F. Brogan, eds. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. An excellent guide to key terms and topics throughout the history of the field, with good bibliographical references.

Wellek, René, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. 3rd rev. ed. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. First published in 1949, this study remains a standard work.