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11th out of 100 books
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The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry
A classic that has been widely used by several generations, this book consists of detailed commentaries on ten famous English poems from the Elizabethan period to the present. Index.
Paperback, 324 pages
Published
February 23rd 1956
by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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In my freshman year of college, I remembered reading Brooks' essay on Keats: A Sylvan Historian, I was completely engulfed with Mr. Brooks interpretation of the poem. It gave me a different perspective on how to further analyze Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. Moreover, when I read the essay, I felt like I was having a conversation with someone who I hoped to emulate one day. Years later, to use a Bloom word, The Well Wrought Urn did not reach the apotheosis of critical writing I remembered reading ...more
Ah, the bible for old-fogy English professors who can't quite claw themselves beyond Matthew Arnold. It's a good, even necessary, book for the serious student of literary criticism. But please do remember that a few other important books have been published since. You really don't want to be "that guy," the one who inveighs against anything contravening Aristotilian poetics.
Beautiful and insightful. The formalist in me loves this; the close-readings are models for student essays.
Ron Tuohy
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Old me, still enamored of the the New Criticism.
Blah. he has some good readings of Keats and Donne, but too much time is taken up with quarrels with unheard of authors who seem to have pissed him off somehow. I'm perfectly fine with that- and I'm pretty much ok with much of the tenets of New Criticism- but the results aren't all that interesting or incisive.
Some good sections, interesting passages, but on the whole nothing that really affected me much. I thought there was more to be found. I won't look any further this...more
I'm not sure why I read this. It's supposedly a "classic" in poetry studies but hopefully poetry studies have come a long way since this was written. If you're intrested in reading some smart things about old poems, this is a good one for you.
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