Atlas: Selected Essays, 1989-2007

Poets on Poetry

by Alfred Corn

Alfred Corn is one of the most learned and, at the same time, one of the most accessible contemporary poets. His work often displays a Whitman-like embrace of the many facets of contemporary life while demonstrating a dexterous mastery of received and invented forms and meters.

Corn is also a polymath---even describing himself as "globocentric" in an interview at the end of the book---with knowledge and interests extending to languages, theology, music, theater, and the graphic arts. Even though the essays gathered here are all literary in nature, a knowledge of history, of religion, and of the arts underpins every piece, producing a breadth of scope that is refreshing and unpredictable.

The title of the collection, Atlas, is apt in the sense of travel, both physical and abstract. Corn's essays range from a reminiscence of a journey to Elizabeth Bishop's birthplace; to his exchange as a college student of letters with Flannery O'Connor, in which the renowned author writes to Corn about the nature of faith; to his reassessment of Auden's Christmas Oratorio; to his lively look at the Canterbury Tales; to Corn's retrospective consideration of Wordsworth. While many such essay collections limit themselves to the modern and contemporary periods, Corn's enthusiasm for Chaucer and Keats is as fresh and inquisitive as that which he holds for Bishop, Thom Gunn, or Derek Mahon.

These engaging pieces from one of our finest poets and essayists will send the reader back to the original texts with new insights and new questions.

Alfred Corn is the author of twelve books of poems, including Stake: Selected Poems, 1972–1992, and Contradictions. He has also published a novel and four works of literary criticism, including The Metamorphoses of Metaphor. Corn has received fellowships and prizes from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. He lives in Hudson, New York.

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Alfred Corn was born in Bainbridge, Georgia, in 1943. He grew up in Valdosta, Georgia, and received his B.A. in French literature from Emory University in 1965. He was awarded an M.A. in French literature from Columbia University in 1967, his degree work including a year spent in Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship and two years of teaching in the French Department at Columbia College.

His first book of poems, All Roads at Once, appeared in 1976, followed by A Call in the Midst of the Crowd (1978), The Various Light (1980), Notes from a Child of Paradise (1984), The West Door (1988), and Autobiographies (1992). His seventh book of poems, titled Present, appeared in 1997, along with the novel Part of His Story. Stake: Selected Poems, 1972-1992, appeared in 1999, followed by Contradictions in 2002, which was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award.

Corn has also published a collection of critical essays titled The Metamorphoses of Metaphor (1989), The Poem’s Heartbeat (1997), and a work of art criticism, Aaron Rose Photographs (Abrams, 2001). A frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review and The Nation, he also writes art criticism for Art in America and ARTnews magazines.

Corn has received fellowships and prizes from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Academy of American Poets, and the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine.

He has taught at the City University of New York, Yale, Connecticut College, the University of Cincinnati, U.C.L.A., Ohio State University, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Tulsa.