Henry Weinfield – författare

Drawn from fifteen years of work, The Sorrows of Eros and Other Poems presents a rich selection of the verse of Henry Weinfield. Many of the poems contained here appear for the first time. The sensuous lyricism of the English tradition and the classic austerity of philosophical discourse are brought together in this poetry in a way that is unique in our times. A master of rhyme and meter, Weinfield's sonnets, tercets, and rhyme royal fall upon the ear with rare grace. Brilliantly allusive in their frames of reference, they are woven from the stuff of Dante, Shakespeare, and Shelley: Plato, Genesis, and the Book of Job. Yet Weinfield is also given to the kind of rigorous intellectual speculation that one usually associates with poets such as William Bronk or George Oppen, and a refined process of abstraction never fails to give the work an utterly contemporary edge. His subject matter is equally challenging; here are poems about political violence, the anomie of the postmodern city, the bittersweet disasters of the erotic life. Powerfully chastening, these poems nevertheless can comfort, charm, and delight; they are "The luminous and liquid solacings/ That language proffers against the void."

In 1982 William Bronk won the American Book Award for his book Life Supports: New & Collected Poems. Since then, he has written seven additional books, and Sagetrieb has devoted an entire issue to his work. Bronk is unquestionably a major poet––utterly original, uncompromisingly abstract in content, and deeply sensuous in form. Michael Heller, in The New York Times Book Review, said Bronk’s poetry is “singularly persistent in its own investigation of how our deepest truths are those which are most unsayable.” This volume spans Bronk’s entire career, from his first book Light and Dark, to his most recent Some Words and The Mild Day (Talisman), which the Village Voice praised as “offering epigrammatic style, philosophical reverie, and haiku-like concision.” Selected Poems is an indispensable collection, containing the most compelling and the most popular of Bronk’s eloquent poems.

Blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, has been central to English poetry since the Renaissance. It is the basic vehicle of Shakespeare's plays and the form in which Milton chose to write Paradise Lost. Milton associated it with freedom, and the Romantics, connecting it in turn with freethinking, used it to explore change and confront modernity, sometimes in unexpectedly radical ways. Henry Weinfield's detailed readings of the masterpieces of English blank verse focus on Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson and Stevens. He traces the philosophical and psychological struggles underlying these poets' choice of form and genre, and the extent to which their work is marked, consciously or not, by the influence of other poets. Unusually attuned to echoes between poems, this study sheds new light on how important poetic texts, most of which are central to the literary canon, unfold as works of art.