The Substance of Shadow: A Darkening Trope in Poetic History

Synopsis

John Hollander, poet and scholar, was a master whose work joined luminous learning and imaginative risk. This book, based on the unpublished Clark Lectures Hollander delivered in 1999 at Cambridge University, witnesses his power to shift the horizons of our thinking, as he traces the history of shadow in British and American poetry from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century. Shadow shows itself here in myriad literary identities, revealing its force as a way of seeing and a form of knowing, as material for fable and parable. Taking up a vast range of texts—from the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton to Poe, Dickinson, Eliot, and Stevens—Hollander describes how metaphors of shadow influence our ideas of dreaming, desire, doubt, and death. These shadows of poetry and prose fiction point to unknown, often fearful domains of human experience, showing us concealed shapes of truth and possibility. Crucially, Hollander explores how shadows in poetic history become things with a strange substance and life of their own: they acquire the power to console, haunt, stalk, wander, threaten, command, and destroy. Shadow speaks, even sings, revealing to us the lost as much as the hidden self. An extraordinary blend of literary analysis and speculative thought, Hollander’s account of the substance of shadow lays bare the substance of poetry itself.

Copyright:

2016

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

Book Size:

184 Pages

ISBN-13:

9780226354309

Related ISBNs:

9780226354279

Publisher:

University of Chicago Press

Date of Addition:

03/31/21

Copyrighted By:

The University of Chicago

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Poetry, Art and Architecture, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.

Edited by:

Kenneth Gross