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September, 1984

ISBN (cloth): 

978-0-87023-445-3

Out of print

Related Subjects:

A Usable Past

Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetry

Paul Mariani

Written by a highly praised poet and critic, A Usable Past contains a selection of sixteen essays published over the last ten years. Mariani has chosen those reflecting his most abiding interests and includes discussions of poets who have provided him with "a usable past." There are five essays on William Carlos Williams, including the acclaimed "Resembling the Dust" (nominated for a Pushcart Prize), the opening piece which Mariani calls the suppressed prolegomena to his biography of Williams, A New World Naked. There are four on Gerard Manely Hopkins which show the poet at work. And there are, finally, seven on writers and poets whom Mariani has carefully reassessed for what they have to teach us today--Robert Penn Warren, Charles Tomlinson, Robert Creeley, John Montague, John Berryman, Robert Pack, and Thomas Merton.

"Mariani is a genuine authority on both Williams and Hopkins. His two books on Williams, and his commentary on Hopkins, are seminal works. They have proven indispensable to scholars in the field of modern poetry, and these uncollected essays . . . modify and extend his views. . . . I found the essays on Warren, Tomlinson, Creeley, Montague, Berryman, and Pack uniformly acute, sensitive--each poet's very different aesthetic, and richly textured. . . . Overall, Mariani's collection is superb. It contains some terribly important essays on several of our most central poets. It is beautifully written, well-informed, lucid work."—Jay Parini, Middlebury College

"I have read Paul Mariani's collection of essays with instruction and delight. About their value there is no question; some of them are outright jewels, some will become famous, and all are opportunities for readers to meet and profit from a unique mind working in unique directions and at unique depth."—Terrence Des Pres, Colgate University

Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Paul Mariani is author of A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. His William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked was selected as one of the editors' choice volumes in the New York Times Book Review. Mariani's collections of poems are Timing Devices: Poems and Crossing Cocytus: Poems.