Stephen Burt – författare

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) was the most influential poetry critic of his generation. He was also a lyric poet, comic novelist, translator, children''s book author, and close friend of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, and many other important writers of his time. Jarrell won the 1960 National Book Award for poetry and served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Amid the resurgence of interest in Randall Jarrell, Stephen Burt offers this brilliant analysis of the poet and essayist.Burt''s book examines all of Jarrell''s work, incorporating new research based on previously undiscovered essays and poems. Other books have examined Jarrell''s poetry in biographical or formal terms, but none have considered both his aesthetic choices and their social contexts. Beginning with an overview of Jarrell''s life and loves, Burt argues that Jarrell''s poetry responded to the political questions of the 1930s, the anxieties and social constraints of wartime America, and the apparent prosperity, domestic ideals, and professional ideology that characterized the 1950s. Jarrell''s work is peopled by helpless soldiers, anxious suburban children, trapped housewives, and lonely consumers. Randall Jarrell and His Age situates the poet-critic among his peers—including Bishop, Lowell, and Arendt—in literature and cultural criticism. Burt considers the ways in which Jarrell''s efforts and achievements encompassed the concerns of his time, from teen culture to World War II to the Cuban Missile Crisis; the book asks, too, how those efforts might speak to us now.

Early in the twentieth century, Americans and other English-speaking nations began to regard adolescence as a separate phase of life. Associated with uncertainty, inwardness, instability, and sexual energy, adolescence acquired its own tastes, habits, subcultures, slang, economic interests, and art forms. This new idea of adolescence became the driving force behind some of the modern era''s most original poetry.Stephen Burt demonstrates how adolescence supplied the inspiration, and at times the formal principles, on which many twentieth-century poets founded their works. William Carlos Williams and his contemporaries fashioned their American verse in response to the idealization of new kinds of youth in the 1910s and 1920s. W. H. Auden''s early work, Philip Larkin''s verse, Thom Gunn''s transatlantic poetry, and Basil Bunting''s late-modernist masterpiece, Briggflatts, all track the development of adolescence in Britain as it moved from the private space of elite schools to the urban public space of sixties subcultures. The diversity of American poetry from the Second World War to the end of the sixties illuminates poets'' reactions to the idea that teenagers, juvenile delinquents, hippies, and student radicals might, for better or worse, transform the nation. George Oppen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Robert Lowell in particular built and rebuilt their sixties styles in reaction to changing concepts of youth. Contemporary poets continue to fashion new ideas of youth. Laura Kasischke and Jorie Graham focus on the discoveries of a specifically female adolescence. The Irish poet Paul Muldoon and the Australian poet John Tranter use teenage perspectives to represent a postmodernist uncertainty. Other poets have rejected traditional and modern ideas of adolescence, preferring instead to view this age as a reflection of the uncertainties and restricted tastes of the way we live now. The first comprehensive study of adolescence in twentieth-century poetry, The Forms of Youth recasts the history of how English-speaking cultures began to view this phase of life as a valuable state of consciousness, if not the very essence of a Western identity.

This book answers a number of fundamental questions about listening in coaching and mentoring. What difference does being heard make to the speaker? How does it have that effect? What are the necessary components of good listening? How do you evaluate your practice as a listener and how do you improve?

The process of writing this book led the author to look closely at his own practice, test, experiment, and push his listening to a higher level. He invites the reader to do the same. This book identifies what it takes to listen well – the skills, mind-set, presence, self-awareness and self-management – and why it can be hard. It demonstrates how four modes of listening – attention, inquiry, observation and use of self – all contribute to the listener’s understanding and to the speaker’s awareness. It argues that we all have a ‘learning edge’ as listeners and provides a framework that helps each of us find it.

The book is intended as a companion for anyone who commits to becoming a good listener. It shows how to develop expertise in the four modes of listening. It offers examples and principles to guide practice, questions for reflection, and a series of ‘workouts’ to help the listener develop their ability to listen. It encourages by showing how good listening is simple – you turn up, pay attention, and listen with all you have, and it challenges by identifying the work it takes to do that.

This book answers a number of fundamental questions about listening in coaching and mentoring. What difference does being heard make to the speaker? How does it have that effect? What are the necessary components of good listening? How do you evaluate your practice as a listener and how do you improve?

The process of writing this book led the author to look closely at his own practice, test, experiment, and push his listening to a higher level. He invites the reader to do the same. This book identifies what it takes to listen well – the skills, mind-set, presence, self-awareness and self-management – and why it can be hard. It demonstrates how four modes of listening – attention, inquiry, observation and use of self – all contribute to the listener’s understanding and to the speaker’s awareness. It argues that we all have a ‘learning edge’ as listeners and provides a framework that helps each of us find it.

The book is intended as a companion for anyone who commits to becoming a good listener. It shows how to develop expertise in the four modes of listening. It offers examples and principles to guide practice, questions for reflection, and a series of ‘workouts’ to help the listener develop their ability to listen. It encourages by showing how good listening is simple – you turn up, pay attention, and listen with all you have, and it challenges by identifying the work it takes to do that.