Allen Grossman – författare

"True-Love" is the fulfillment of revered poet-critic Allen Grossman's long service to poetry in the interests of humanity. Poetry's singular mission is to bind love and truth together - love that desires the beloved's continued life, knotted with the truth of life's contingency - to help make us more present to each other. In the spirit of Blake's vow of 'mental fight,' Grossman contends with challenges to the validity of the poetic imagination, from Adorno's maxim 'No poetry after Auschwitz,' to the claims of religious authority upon truth, and the ultimate challenge posed by the fact of death itself. To these challenges he responds with eloquent and rigorous arguments, drawing on wide resources of learning and his experience as master-poet and teacher. Grossman's readings of Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Paul Celan, and others focus on poems that interrogate the real or enact the hard bargains that literary representation demands. "True-Love" is destined to become an essential book wherever poetry and criticism sustain one another.

Allen Grossman's combined reputation as a poet and as a professor of poetry gives him an unusual importance in the landscape of contemporary American poetry. In this new collection Grossman revisits the "Long Schoolroom" of poetic principle--where he eventually learned to reconsider the notion that poetry was cultural work of the kind that contributed unambiguously to the peace of the world. The jist of what he learned--of what his "lessons" taught him--was (in the sentence of Oliver Wendell Holmes): "Where most men have died, there is the greatest interest." According to Grossman, violence arises not merely from the "barbarian" outside of the culture the poet serves, but from the inner logic of that culture; not, as he would now say, from the defeat of cultural membership but from the terms of cultural membership itself.Grossman analyzes the "bitter logic of the poetic principle" as it is articulated in exemplary texts and figures, including Bede's Caedmon and Milton. But the heart of The Long Schoolroom is American, ranging from essays on Whitman and Lincoln to an in-depth review of the work of Hart Crane. His final essays probe the example of postmodern Jewish and Christian poetry in this country, most notably the work of Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsburg, as it searches for an understanding of "holiness" in the production and control of violence.Allen Grossman is author of The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New and Selected, The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers (with Mark Halliday), and most recently, The Philosopher's Window. He is Mellon Professor in the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University.

Allen Grossman's combined reputation as a poet and as a professor of poetry gives him an unusual importance in the landscape of contemporary American poetry. In this new collection Grossman revisits the "Long Schoolroom" of poetic principle--where he eventually learned to reconsider the notion that poetry was cultural work of the kind that contributed unambiguously to the peace of the world. The jist of what he learned--of what his "lessons" taught him--was (in the sentence of Oliver Wendell Holmes): "Where most men have died, there is the greatest interest." According to Grossman, violence arises not merely from the "barbarian" outside of the culture the poet serves, but from the inner logic of that culture; not, as he would now say, from the defeat of cultural membership but from the terms of cultural membership itself.Grossman analyzes the "bitter logic of the poetic principle" as it is articulated in exemplary texts and figures, including Bede's Caedmon and Milton. But the heart of The Long Schoolroom is American, ranging from essays on Whitman and Lincoln to an in-depth review of the work of Hart Crane. His final essays probe the example of postmodern Jewish and Christian poetry in this country, most notably the work of Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsburg, as it searches for an understanding of "holiness" in the production and control of violence.Allen Grossman is author of The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New and Selected, The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers (with Mark Halliday), and most recently, The Philosopher's Window. He is Mellon Professor in the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University.

During a week in January 1981, poets Allen Grossman and Mark Halliday met for a series of conversations exploring "the meanings for us as poets arising from the difference between us-- differences of generation and education as well as of temperament and poetic style." The result was "Against Our Vanishing", which Charles Altieri called " the best in contemporary poetic thinking." "The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers" makes available a revised and significantly expanded version of "Against Our Vanishing" and includes Grossman's recent treatise "Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in the Speculative Poetics". This combined edition provides a sophisticated yet accessible discussion-- across generations-- of "the fundamental discourse of poetic structure". For students and teachers, for writers and readers, "The Sighted Singer" is a splendid introduction to both the tradition of poetry and its contemporary practice.

A collection of poems discussing illusion and reality, the nature of time, and the meaning of death

A series of poems traces the course of a love affair from both the man's and the woman's point of view.

In addition to substantial new work, Allen Grossman in The Ether Dome and Other Poems New and Selected 1979-1991 gives his readers a retrospective of a life in poetry that has brought him such honors as a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a MacArthur Fellowship. The Ether Dome is his seventh book of poems.

The award-winning poet's newest book of poems is heroic and of mythic proportions, showing the compassionate side of men. How to Do Things with Tears is a book of poems brought forth by the Sighted Singer, the poet who holds the central place in Allen Grossman's newest poetic work. "This is a how-to book," Grossman explains. "The heroic singer of tradition is blind. A new singer in this present must be sighted. In this book the poet intends to say something, insofar as a poet can, about the common sadness of living and dying in the world." Like the blind bard of old, Grossman's Sighted Singer conjures visions both high and low, in mythopoetic resonances that excite the sorrows and the laughter of the gods and men.

A comprehensive lifetime selection of poetryfrom the Sweet Youth to the Old Man. Of the early work of Allen Grossman, the late Robert Fitzgerald once wrote: "At times they seem poems of great age, poems at the world's verge, at the verge of time." Of the later work, Jorie Graham observed: "In [his] marriage of meanspart almanac, part allegory, part advice column, obituary page, hymnal, epic dramafrom the bottom reaches of the underworld, to the elevations from which one need cry out to be heardGrossman invents such peace as Poetry can invent." In Sweet Youth, the younger poet and the older one meet at an eternal moment and a dialogue in poetry ensues, as the Allen Grossman of 2001 and the Allen Grossman of nearly fifty years earlier respond to one another's words.The poems of the "Sweet Youth", some of them dating to the early '50s, were originally collected in the poet's first three books: A Harlot's Hire (1961), The Recluse (1965), And the Dew Lay All Night Upon My Branch (1973). Since then, there have been six more books of poetry and four of prose, though in "Sweet Youth," all the poems of "Old Man" are new, written in his seventieth year. Grossman is now the Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University.

Allen Grossman's newest work Descartes' Loneliness blends the comic and tragic. As the writer Ha Jin once wrote, it is "remarkable for the stout spirit of the speaker who dares to be funny while tackling such an austere subject as death." Poems such as "The Famished Dead," where the poet is visited by lost loved ones, "one at a time," confirm Jorie Graham's observation that "from the bottom reaches of the underworld, to the elevations from which one need cry to be heard—Grossman invents such peace as Poetry can invent."