Stephanie Burt – författare

An original exploration and celebration of Taylor Swift, the world's biggest music star, as taught at the world's most prestigious university.One of the biggest stars in the world, Taylor Swift became so popular for many reasons - but first and last thanks to her songs. In Taylor's Version, award-winning literary critic Professor Stephanie Burt charts the extraordinary journey from Swift's teen country debut to her most recent record-breaking achievement as the highest-grossing touring artist in the world. Based on her Harvard University course, Taylor Swift and Her World, Burt offers the first serious study of Swift that pays close attention to her talent as a songwriter first and foremost. Drawing from musical and cultural criticism, poetry, economic theory, American history, as well as personal experience, Burt presents an insightful and heartfelt critical appreciation of Swift that delves into her life, her celebrity and her artistry. She explores how Swift's musical and public persona reflect her life and her craft, at once intimate and relatable. She considers the international community Swift's work has fostered, and she shows what makes Swift's body of work so important across styles, genres and generations.Tracing a path through the Eras, Taylor's Version is a literary deep-dive into Swift's particular form of genius, revealing the remarkable impact of her career and showing how her songs - how music itself - can change lives.

"To read Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden is to read the best-equipped of American critics of poetry of the past century on the best-equipped of its Anglo-American poets, and we rush to read, perhaps, less out of an academic interest in fair judgment than out of a spectator's love of virtuosity in flight." From Adam Gopnik's foreword Randall Jarrell was one of the most important poet-critics of the past century, and the poet who most fascinated and infuriated him was W. H. Auden. In Auden, Jarrell found a crucial poetic influence that needed to be both embraced and resisted. During the 1940s, Jarrell wrestled with Auden's work, writing a series of notorious articles on Auden that remain admired and controversial examples of devoted and contentious criticism. While Jarrell never completed his proposed book on Auden, these previously unpublished lectures revise and reprise his earlier articles and present new insights into Auden's work. Delivered at Princeton University in 1951 and 1952, Jarrell's lectures reflect a passionate appreciation of Auden's work, a witty attack from an informed opponent, and an important document of a major poet's reception.Jarrell's lectures offer readings of many of Auden's works, including all of his long poems, and illuminate his singular use of a variety of stylistic registers and poetic genres. In the lecture based on the article "Freud to Paul," Jarrell traces the ideas and ideologies that animated and, at times, overwhelmed Auden's poetry. More precisely, he considers the influence of left-liberal politics, psychoanalytic and evolutionary theory, and the idiosyncratic Christian theology that characterized Auden's poems of the 1940s. While an admiring and sympathetic reader, Jarrell does not avoid identifying Auden's poetic failures and political excesses. He offers occasionally blistering assessments of individual poems and laments Auden's turn from a cryptic, feeling, impassioned poet to a rhetorical, self-conscious one. Stephen Burt's introduction provides a backdrop to the lectures and their reception and importance for the history of modern poetry.

Poets have depicted queer desire, same-sex love, and life outside gender norms since the beginning of the written word. Across eras and generations—from classical Greece to Renaissance England to the Harlem Renaissance—such experiences could be put into verse even when they would not have been named as we name them today. Some of these poems invite passion and admiration; others provoke new historical and literary inquiry.All the World in Thee presents a selection of poems about LGBTQ+ experiences, spanning from English translations of Homer, Sappho, and Catullus to canonical poetry by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Tennyson through early-twentieth-century writers including Angelina Weld Grimké, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes. It features verse by well-known figures like John Donne, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Gertrude Stein alongside lesser-known or recently rediscovered works, such as the first lesbian love poems recorded in Great Britain, bawdy eighteenth-century ballads, and homoerotic late-nineteenth-century poems about cowboys and football players. A critical introduction discusses patterns of LGBTQ+ poetry that persist across genres and centuries as well as the fraught history of representations of whiteness and racial difference. Edited by three prominent poetry critics and scholars, All the World in Thee provides a poignant and powerful new way to understand LGBTQ+ identities and feelings over time.

Poets have depicted queer desire, same-sex love, and life outside gender norms since the beginning of the written word. Across eras and generations—from classical Greece to Renaissance England to the Harlem Renaissance—such experiences could be put into verse even when they would not have been named as we name them today. Some of these poems invite passion and admiration; others provoke new historical and literary inquiry.All the World in Thee presents a selection of poems about LGBTQ+ experiences, spanning from English translations of Homer, Sappho, and Catullus to canonical poetry by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Tennyson through early-twentieth-century writers including Angelina Weld Grimké, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes. It features verse by well-known figures like John Donne, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Gertrude Stein alongside lesser-known or recently rediscovered works, such as the first lesbian love poems recorded in Great Britain, bawdy eighteenth-century ballads, and homoerotic late-nineteenth-century poems about cowboys and football players. A critical introduction discusses patterns of LGBTQ+ poetry that persist across genres and centuries as well as the fraught history of representations of whiteness and racial difference. Edited by three prominent poetry critics and scholars, All the World in Thee provides a poignant and powerful new way to understand LGBTQ+ identities and feelings over time.

Few poetic forms have found more uses than the sonnet in English, and none is now more recognizable. It is one of the longest-lived of verse forms, and one of the briefest. A mere fourteen lines, fashioned by intricate rhymes, it is, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti called it, “a moment’s monument.” From the Renaissance to the present, the sonnet has given poets a superb vehicle for private contemplation, introspection, and the expression of passionate feelings and thoughts.The Art of the Sonnet collects one hundred exemplary sonnets of the English language (and a few sonnets in translation), representing highlights in the history of the sonnet, accompanied by short commentaries on each of the poems. The commentaries by Stephanie Burt and David Mikics offer new perspectives and insights, and, taken together, demonstrate the enduring as well as changing nature of the sonnet. The authors serve as guides to some of the most-celebrated sonnets in English as well as less-well-known gems by nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets. Also included is a general introductory essay, in which the authors examine the sonnet form and its long and fascinating history, from its origin in medieval Sicily to its English appropriation in the sixteenth century to sonnet writing today in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other English-speaking parts of the world.

Winner of the 2025 New England Book Award for PoetryA major poet and literary critic leads an aesthetic adventure through poems about queer experience, by writers who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, trans, nonbinary, gender fluid, and more. A groundbreaking anthology edited by acclaimed poet, critic, and scholar Stephanie Burt, Super Gay Poems brings together fifty-one works encompassing the wide range of queer and trans verse after the Stonewall uprising of 1969. Since that galvanizing moment, poetry has served as both a vehicle for queer liberation and a witness to its sometimes fragile, sometimes ebullient flourishing, across the world.The poems in this anthology represent the great variety of queer and trans life itself. They include near-sonnets, iambic couplets, and rhymed quatrains; skinny dimeters and shaped poems; chatty free verse and intentionally inaccurate translations; the demotic and the rococo. Arranged in chronological order, the selections trace queer culture’s recent evolutions. Frank O’Hara, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, James Merrill, Thom Gunn, Jackie Kay, Adrienne Rich, Chen Chen, essa ranapiri, and The Cyborg Jillian Weise—poets widely known and poets who deserve to be—share their alienation, their euphoria, and their encounters with a protean community as it discovers new solidarities and new selves.Each piece is paired with a concise, eye-opening essay in Burt’s trademark style, with verve and an inimitable literary ear. A treasury of aesthetic experience and insight, Super Gay Poems points protestors, political organizers, poetry lovers, and LGBTQIA+ readers toward many beautiful tomorrows.

A delightful and provocative journey across four decades of contemporary American poetry with Stephanie Burt, “the leading poetry critic of her generation” (New York Times), as our surefooted guide.Contemporary American poetry has plenty to offer. Yet its difficulty—and sheer variety—leaves many readers puzzled or overwhelmed. Beginning with poems written in the early 1980s, critic and poet Stephanie Burt canvasses American poetry from the urgency of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen to the pathos of Louise Glück, the limitless energy of Juan Felipe Herrera, and the erotic provocations of D. A. Powell.Burt presents a wide range of poems, each accompanied by an original essay explaining how it works, why it matters, and how it speaks to art and culture more broadly. Included here are classics (by Ashbery, Komunyakaa, Hass) and less-famous poems by very famous poets (Glück, Kay Ryan); verse from prizewinning authors near the start of their careers and by others not yet well known.The Poem Is You is crafted especially for those readers who don’t know where to start with contemporary American poetry, describing what these writers have fashioned for one another, and what they can give us today.

Contemporary American poetry has plenty to offer new readers, and plenty more for those who already follow it. Yet its difficulty—and sheer variety—leaves many readers puzzled or overwhelmed. The critic, scholar, and poet Stephanie Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s, where critical consensus ends, Burt canvasses American poetry of the past four decades, from the headline-making urgency of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen to the stark pathos of Louise Glück, the limitless energy of Juan Felipe Herrera, and the erotic provocations of D. A. Powell.The Poem Is You: Sixty Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them is a guide to the diverse magnificences of American poetry today. It presents a wide range of poems selected by Burt for this volume, each accompanied by an original essay explaining how a given poem works, why it matters, and how the poem speaks to other parts of art and culture. Included here are some classroom classics (by Ashbery, Komunyakaa, Hass), less famous poems by very famous poets (Glück, Kay Ryan), and poems by prizewinning poets near the start of their careers (such as Brandon Som), and by others who are not—or not yet—well known.The Poem Is You will appeal to poets, teachers, and students, but it is intended especially for readers who want to learn more about contemporary American poetry but who have not known where or how to start. It describes what American poets have fashioned for one another, and what they can give us today.

Contemporary translations and adaptations of ancient Greek poet Callimachus by noted writer and critic Stephanie BurtCallimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Greeks and Romans, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. In After Callimachus, esteemed poet and critic Stephanie Burt’s attentive translations and inspired adaptations introduce the work, spirit, and letter of Callimachus to today’s poetry readers.Skillfully combining intricate patterns of sound and classical precedent with the very modern concerns of sex, gender, love, death, and technology, these poems speak with a twenty-first-century voice, while also opening multiple gateways to ancient worlds. This Callimachus travels the Mediterranean, pays homage to Athena and Zeus, develops erotic fixations, practices funerary commemoration, and brings fresh gifts for the cult of Artemis. This reimagined poet also visits airports, uses Tumblr and Twitter, listens to pop music, and fights contemporary patriarchy. Burt bears careful fealty to Callimachus’s whole poems, even as she builds freely from some of the hundreds of surviving fragments. Here is an ancient Greek poet made fresh for our times. An informative foreword by classicist Mark Payne places Burt's renderings of Callimachus in literary and historical context.After Callimachus is at once a contribution to contemporary poetry and a new endeavor in the art of classical adaptation and translation.

Contemporary translations and adaptations of ancient Greek poet Callimachus by noted writer and critic Stephanie BurtCallimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Greeks and Romans, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. In After Callimachus, esteemed poet and critic Stephanie Burt’s attentive translations and inspired adaptations introduce the work, spirit, and letter of Callimachus to today’s poetry readers.Skillfully combining intricate patterns of sound and classical precedent with the very modern concerns of sex, gender, love, death, and technology, these poems speak with a twenty-first-century voice, while also opening multiple gateways to ancient worlds. This Callimachus travels the Mediterranean, pays homage to Athena and Zeus, develops erotic fixations, practices funerary commemoration, and brings fresh gifts for the cult of Artemis. This reimagined poet also visits airports, uses Tumblr and Twitter, listens to pop music, and fights contemporary patriarchy. Burt bears careful fealty to Callimachus’s whole poems, even as she builds freely from some of the hundreds of surviving fragments. Here is an ancient Greek poet made fresh for our times. An informative foreword by classicist Mark Payne places Burt's renderings of Callimachus in literary and historical context.After Callimachus is at once a contribution to contemporary poetry and a new endeavor in the art of classical adaptation and translation.

Helen Vendler may be America's most important poetry critic. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Vendler has remained a key figure in the academy while also teaching a much larger public how to read and enjoy poems and poetry through her many articles for the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books. With ""Something Understood"", some of the most important poets, critics, and scholars in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland pay tribute to five decades of Vendler's work. Included here are new poems, written especially for this volume, from such luminaries as Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove, and Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Wright. The essays, also exclusive to this book, address a spectrum of issues, from the vastness of the poetic tradition to poetry's irreducible building blocks. Elaine Scarry considers what poetic vocation has meant to Heaney, to Thomas Hardy, and to Vendler herself. Deborah Forbes asks what the poems of John Keats have to say to the people of Zambia. Jahan Ramazani provides arguments and advice that any teacher of poetry can use. All the contributors have learned from Helen Vendler or been inspired by her work. The result is not only a celebration of Vendler's critical powers but also a major compilation of poems and essays representing contemporary American poetry as it is practiced and debated.

An original exploration and celebration of Taylor Swift, the world's biggest music star, as taught at the world's most prestigious university.One of the biggest stars in the world, Taylor Swift became so popular for many reasons - but first and last thanks to her songs. In Taylor's Version, award-winning literary critic Professor Stephanie Burt charts the extraordinary journey from Swift's teen country debut to her most recent record-breaking achievement as the highest-grossing touring artist in the world. Based on her Harvard University course, Taylor Swift and Her World, Burt offers the first serious study of Swift that pays close attention to her talent as a songwriter first and foremost. Drawing from musical and cultural criticism, poetry, economic theory, American history, as well as personal experience, Burt presents an insightful and heartfelt critical appreciation of Swift that delves into her life, her celebrity and her artistry. She explores how Swift's musical and public persona reflect her life and her craft, at once intimate and relatable. She considers the international community Swift's work has fostered, and she shows what makes Swift's body of work so important across styles, genres and generations.Tracing a path through the Eras, Taylor's Version is a literary deep-dive into Swift's particular form of genius, revealing the remarkable impact of her career and showing how her songs - how music itself - can change lives.

An original exploration and celebration of Taylor Swift, the world's biggest music star, as taught at the world's most prestigious university.One of the biggest stars in the world, Taylor Swift became so popular for many reasons - but first and last thanks to her songs. In Taylor's Version, award-winning literary critic Professor Stephanie Burt charts the extraordinary journey from Swift's teen country debut to her most recent record-breaking achievement as the highest-grossing touring artist in the world. Based on her Harvard University course, Taylor Swift and Her World, Burt offers the first serious study of Swift that pays close attention to her talent as a songwriter first and foremost.Drawing from musical and cultural criticism, poetry, economic theory, American history, as well as personal experience, Burt presents an insightful and heartfelt critical appreciation of Swift that delves into her life, her celebrity and her artistry. She explores how Swift's musical and public persona reflect her life and her craft, at once intimate and relatable. She considers the international community Swift's work has fostered, and she shows what makes Swift's body of work so important across styles, genres and generations.Tracing a path through the Eras, Taylor's Version is a literary deep-dive into Swift's particular form of genius, revealing the remarkable impact of her career and showing how her songs - how music itself - can change lives.

This spirited collection brings you 100 exclusive recipes from South Carolina's most renowned bars.Explore South Carolina's rich history, charming cities, and lush landscapes through its unique cocktail culture. With over 100 recipes and numerous bartender profiles, South Carolina Cocktails allows you to experience the state's spirited lifestyle whether you're a resident mixing drinks for friends or a visitor looking to bring a piece of your travels back home. From rooftop bars to beachfront shacks, discover venues that offer an authentic taste of South Carolina’s diverse drinking scenes. Celebrate the best mixologists in the region and their signature concoctions with an insider’s guide to the must-visit spots across the state.Within the gorgeous, die-cut covers, you'll find:More than 100 must-try cocktails, including recipes for bespoke ingredients and other serving suggestionsInterviews with the state’s trendsetting bartenders and mixologistsBartending tips and techniques from the expertsFood and drink hotspots across the stateAnd much more!Whether you're soaking in the historic ambiance of Charleston, enjoying the lively beaches of Myrtle Beach, or savoring the Lowcountry's culinary delights, this book brings South Carolina's favorite libations right to your home bar.

"At once erudite and colloquial" (New Yorker), this book provides an accessible introduction to the joys and challenges of poetry In Don't Read Poetry, poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another-and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish-and distinguish among-individual poems.A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike.