Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry

by Rosanna Warren

Fables of the Self traces ideas of imagined selfhood through the lyric poetry of classical Greece and Rome, the modernist poetry of France, and modern and contemporary English and American lyrics. Rosanna Warren's work emerges from the tradition of British and American poet-critics such as William Empson, Donald Davie, and Randall Jarrell. Her readings of Sappho, Virgil, Baudelaire, Melville, Rimbaud, Mark Strand, and Louise Glück, among others, combine Helen Vendler's passionate attention to detail and something of Harold Bloom's panoramic view. Warren opposes both the literalizing, autobiographical approach to self in so-called confessional poetry and the other extreme of avant-garde erasures of self. Framing her critical studies between a memoir of childhood and a concluding journal entry, Warren has composed an occult autobiography, showing the imagination as a transfiguring and potentially moral force.

Genres: Poetry

352 pages, Hardcover

First published September 22, 2008

About the author

On July 27, 1953, Rosanna Warren was born in Fairfield, Connecticut. She studied painting at Yale University, where she graduated in 1976, and an MA in 1980 from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

She is the author of Ghost in a Red Hat (W.W. Norton, 2011); Departure (2003); Stained Glass (1993), which was named the Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets; Each Leaf Shines Separate (1984); and Snow Day (1981).

She has also published a translation of Euripides’s Suppliant Women (with Stephen Scully; Oxford, 1995), a book of literary criticism, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry (W.W. Norton, 2008), and has edited several books, including The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field (Northeastern, 1989).

Her awards include the Pushcart Prize, the Award of Merit in Poetry and the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the May Sarton Prize, the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, the Ingram Merrill Grant for Poetry, a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Award, the Nation/“Discovery” Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Warren served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005. In the fall of 2000, she was The New York Times Resident in Literature at the American Academy in Rome.

She is a contributing editor of Seneca Review and the poetry editor of Daedalus. She was the Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities at Boston University. She is a professor at The Committee of Social Thought at the University of Chicago and lives in Chicago, IL.

Reviews

[Ann Michael]

I liked much of this book. And I learned much from this book, particularly about the lyric metrical strategies of "classic" poets (I mean The Classics, as in Greco-Roman).

As a whole, however, it seemed too much like a compilation of essays that don't entirely mesh. Sometimes a mix of scholarly pieces and memoir or instructive pieces/reviews can manage to hang together in a text. This one doesn't quite.