{"title":"Willard Spiegelman","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"didactic-muse-book-willard-spiegelman-9780691014609","title":"The Didactic Muse","description":"Writing with the vigor and elan that readers have come to expect from his many astute reviews and essays, Willard Spiegelman maintains that contemporary American poets have returned to the poetic aims of an earlier era: to edify, as well as to delight, and thus to serve the \"didactic muse.\" What Spiegelman says about individual poets--such as Nemerov, Hecht, Ginsberg, Pinsky, Ammons, Rich, and Merrill, among others--is wonderfully insightful. Furthermore, his outlook on their work--the way he takes quite literally the teacherly elements of their poems--challenges long-standing conceptions both about contemporary writing and about the poetry of the Eliot-Pound-Stevens-Williams generation. Beginning the book with a meditation on W. H. Auden's legacy to American poets, Spiegelman ends with a discussion of the multiple scenes of learning in Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover, which he identifies as not only the major epic poem of the second half of the twentieth century but also as the period's most important georgic: a textbook full of scientific, mythic, artistic, and human instruction. The Didactic Muse reminds us that poets have traditionally acknowledged their function as teachers, from Horace's advice that poetry should please and instruct to Robert Frost's aphorism that a poem \"begins in delight and ends in wisdom.\" Whereas many of the critical remarks of the most important Romantic and modern poets suggest their desperate attempts to separate poetry from instruction, Spiegelman demonstrates that their practices often contradicted their theories. And he shows that our best contemporary poets are now embracing the older, classical paradigms.  Originally published in 1989.  The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49626177569041,"sku":"GOR013576012","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50469392744721,"sku":"CIN0691014604G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":53370709967121,"sku":"CIN0691014604LN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0691014604.jpg?v=1750912179"},{"product_id":"nothing-stays-put-book-willard-spiegelman-9780525658269","title":"Nothing Stays Put","description":"\u003cb\u003eA \u003ci\u003eNEW YORKER\u003c\/i\u003e BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR . LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 PLUTARCH AWARD\u003c\/b\u003e . An evocative portrait of the beloved and acclaimed poet, whose late-in-life success took the literary world by storm.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Clampitt comes to life here...Spiegelman's \u003ci\u003eNothing Stays Put\u003c\/i\u003e embodies a different kind of investigation, not surveillance but a thoughtful examination that at times still spins off into a kind of awe.\" -\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e With the publication of her first book of poems in her sixty-third year, Amy Clampitt rose meteorically to fame, launching herself from obscurity to the upper ranks of American poetry all but overnight, and living a whirlwind eleven years, until her death in 1994. Years later, as renowned poetry scholar Willard Spiegelman wades into her papers and poems, he discovers a woman of dazzling intellect, staunch progressive politics, and an inexhaustible sense of wonder for the world and the words we've invented to describe it.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Giving equal weight to the life and the poetry, Spiegelman untangles Clampitt's famously allusive lines to reveal the experiences they emerged from, pulling the curtain back on her nearly four decades of artistic anonymity, and in doing so assembling a rich period piece of Manhattan during the days in which Clampitt worked for Oxford University Press and the National Audubon Society-writing cheery, discursive office memos, and two novels that never got published, before hitting her stride in verse.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eNothing Stays Put\u003c\/i\u003e is a gift to poetry fans, an inspiration to artists striving at any age, and an ode to this most unlikely of literary celebrities, who would publish five acclaimed books and win a MacArthur \"Genius Grant\" nearly all in the final decade of her life.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49743157264657,"sku":"NGR9780525658269","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51003335966993,"sku":"NIN9780525658269","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51612935586065,"sku":"CIN0525658262G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51727039136017,"sku":"GOR013310434","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0525658262.jpg?v=1751008606"},{"product_id":"senior-moments-book-southern-methodist-university-9780374261221","title":"Senior Moments","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA moving collection of essays on aging and happiness\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDrawing on more than six decades' worth of lessons from his storied career as a writer and professor, Willard Spiegelman reflects with candid humor and sophistication on growing old. \u003ci\u003eSenior Moments\u003c\/i\u003e is a series of discrete essays that, when taken together, constitute the life of a man who, despite Western cultural notions of aging as something to be denied, overcome, and resisted, has continued to relish the simplest of pleasures: reading, looking at art, talking, and indulging in occasional fits of nostalgia while also welcoming what inevitably lies ahead. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSpiegelman's expertly crafted book considers, with wisdom and elegance, how to be alert to the joys that brim from unexpected places even as death draws near.\u003ci\u003e Senior Moments\u003c\/i\u003e is a foray into the felicity and follies that age brings; a consideration of how and what one reads or rereads in late adulthood; the eagerness for, and disappointment in, long-awaited reunions, at which the past comes alive in the present. A clear-eyed book of memories, written in eight searching and courageously honest essays, \u003ci\u003eSenior Moments\u003c\/i\u003e is guaranteed to stimulate, stir, and restore.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50038019162385,"sku":"CIN0374261229G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0374261229.jpg?v=1751292166"},{"product_id":"seven-pleasures-book-willard-spiegelman-9780312429676","title":"Seven Pleasures","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhat does it mean to be happy? Ever since the Founding Fathers invited every citizen to join the pursuit of happiness, Americans have been studying and pining for that elusive state of mind. But rather than explaining happiness, in \u003ci\u003eSeven Pleasures\u003c\/i\u003e Willard Spiegelman demonstrates it: he immerses usin the joyful, illuminating practice of seven simple pleasures --dancing, reading, walking, looking, listening, swimming, and writing--and evokes all the satisfactions they offer. Lighthearted, insightful, and deeply felt, \u003ci\u003eSeven Pleasures\u003c\/i\u003e is a portrait of pure enjoyment.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50169765921041,"sku":"CIN0312429673G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50407071809809,"sku":"GOR007394975","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52660990116113,"sku":"NLS9780312429676","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52734936613137,"sku":"NIN9780312429676","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53345124352273,"sku":"CIN0312429673VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/B09L4RSLT3.jpg?v=1751228475"},{"product_id":"seven-pleasures-book-willard-spiegelman-9780374239305","title":"Seven Pleasures","description":"What does it mean to be happy? Ever since the Founding Fathers enshrined it - along with life and liberty - as our national birthright, Americans have had an obsession with the 'pursuit of happiness'. Whether it means the accumulation of wealth or a more vaguely understood notion of self-fulfillment or self-actualization, happiness has been an inevitable, although elusive, goal. But it is hard to separate 'real' happiness from the banal, self-help version that embraces mindless positive thinking. And though we have two booming 'happiness industries' - religion, with its promise of salvation, and psychopharmacology, with its promise of better living through chemistry - each comes with its own problems and complications. In \"Seven Pleasures\", Willard Spiegelman takes a look at the possibilities for achieving ordinary secular happiness without recourse to either religion or drugs. In this erudite and frequently hilarious book of essays, he discusses seven activities that lead naturally and easily to a sense of well-being. One of these - dancing - requires a partner, and therefore provides a lesson in civility, or good citizenship, as one of its benefits. The other six - reading, walking, looking, listening, swimming, and writing - are things one performs alone. Seven Pleasures is a marvelously engaging guide to the pursuit of happiness, and all its accompanying delights.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50350299775249,"sku":"CIN0374239304G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51205719163153,"sku":"CIN0374239304VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53440212992273,"sku":"CIN0374239304A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0374239304.jpg?v=1750910308"},{"product_id":"how-poets-see-the-world-book-willard-spiegelman-9780195332926","title":"How Poets See the World","description":"Although readers of prose fiction sometimes find descriptive passages superfluous or boring, description itself is often the most important aspect of a poem. This book examines how a variety of contemporary poets use description in their work. Description has been the great burden of poetry. How do poets see the world? How do they look at it? What do they look for? Is description an end in itself, or a means of expressing desire? Ezra Pound demanded that a poem should represent the external world as objectively and directly as possible, and William Butler Yeats, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), said that he and his generation were rebelling against, inter alia, \"irrelevant descriptions of nature\" in the work of their predecessors. The poets in this book, however, who are distinct in many ways from one another, all observe the external world of nature or the reflected world of art, and make relevant poems out of their observations.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51179317494033,"sku":"NIN9780195332926","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52150426304785,"sku":"NLS9780195332926","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/019533292X.jpg?v=1751258854"},{"product_id":"how-poets-see-the-world-book-willard-spiegelman-9780195174915","title":"How Poets See the World","description":"This book looks closely at a handful of contemporary poets (John Ashbery, Amy Clampitt, Jorie Graham, Charles Tomlinson, and Charles Wright) and, less extensively, at some others, with an eye to explaining the art of description in poetry. How do poets see the world? What are they looking for? How do they transcribe their vision and make poems out of their observations?","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52127535071505,"sku":"NLS9780195174915","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53642078814481,"sku":"CIN0195174917G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780195174915.jpg?v=1757486952"},{"product_id":"majestic-indolence-book-willard-spiegelman-9780195093568","title":"Majestic Indolence","description":"This book examines the theme of indolence in Romantic poetry and demonstrates the rich variety of experiments preformed upon it by a quartet of poets, which focuses on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52143776399633,"sku":"NLS9780195093568","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780195093568.jpg?v=1757585941"},{"product_id":"imaginative-transcripts-book-willard-spiegelman-9780195368130","title":"Imaginative Transcripts","description":"Willard Spiegelman is considered one of the finest critics of poetry writing today and this volume collects his best work on the subject, offering essays that span his entire career and chart his changing relationship to an elusive form. He takes the measure of a wide spectrum of poetry, ranging from the Romantic era to the present, through an examination of those poets whose language, formal experiments, and music have fascinated him throughout his career. With his trademark engaging and stylish prose, Spiegelman takes readers on a tour of the rich and diverse landscape of British and American poetry, as he provides nuanced, insightful readings of works by William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery, to name just a few.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52453497930001,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52453498454289,"sku":"NLS9780195368130","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780195368130.jpg?v=1759368140"},{"product_id":"wordsworth-s-heroes-book-willard-spiegelman-9780520338951","title":"Wordsworth's Heroes","description":"Wordsworth’s Heroes reframes the poet of “egotistical sublime” fame as a maker of ordinary heroism—someone who finds grandeur not at Thermopylae but in cottages, churchyards, and the habits of speech that shape moral character. Willard Spiegelman assembles a gallery of Wordsworth’s “representative men and women”—readers, children, and old men—while staging a decisive rethink of the poet’s alleged self-absorption. Anchored by a fresh account of “Character of the Happy Warrior,” the book shows how Wordsworth abstracts heroism from biography (Nelson) into a type available to “every man in arms”—and, crucially, to noncombatants in the “mild concerns of ordinary life.” Through close readings that braid rhetoric, prosody, and ethics, Spiegelman connects the Happy Warrior to the leech-gatherer of “Resolution and Independence,” to the sculptural presences of “Yew-Trees,” and to Wordsworth’s lifelong negotiation between action and contemplation (agere et pati). The result is a Wordsworth placed not at the margins as eccentric prophet but at the center of the “commonal” (to borrow Wallace Stevens), where the heroic becomes a shared vocation learned by imitation, memory, and speech.   Organized with the classroom and the scholar equally in mind, Wordsworth’s Heroes pairs thematic chapters on readers, children, and elders with sustained interpretations of The Prelude, The White Doe of Rylstone, and The Excursion. Spiegelman tracks how the “divisionary” imagination of the late poems turns characters into instructive exempla, while earlier lyrics test how far happiness, suffering, and endurance can be made heroic without losing their ordinariness. Along the way, the study situates Wordsworth among ancient and modern theorists of greatness—from Theophrastus and Cicero to Emerson, Carlyle, and Stevens—showing how his poetry both absorbs and resists heroic paradigms. This is scholarly criticism with the cadence of literary advocacy: lucid, historically alert, and attentive to how diction, syntax, and stanza shape ethical vision. For readers of Romanticism, narrative, and moral philosophy, Spiegelman offers a compelling case that Wordsworth’s truest heroes are “ourselves”—not exceptions to, but exponents of, the human commonwealth.   This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53497875530001,"sku":"NLS9780520338951","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780520338951.jpg?v=1777935077"},{"product_id":"wordsworth-s-heroes-book-willard-spiegelman-9780520364790","title":"Wordsworth's Heroes","description":"Wordsworth’s Heroes reframes the poet of “egotistical sublime” fame as a maker of ordinary heroism—someone who finds grandeur not at Thermopylae but in cottages, churchyards, and the habits of speech that shape moral character. Willard Spiegelman assembles a gallery of Wordsworth’s “representative men and women”—readers, children, and old men—while staging a decisive rethink of the poet’s alleged self-absorption. Anchored by a fresh account of “Character of the Happy Warrior,” the book shows how Wordsworth abstracts heroism from biography (Nelson) into a type available to “every man in arms”—and, crucially, to noncombatants in the “mild concerns of ordinary life.” Through close readings that braid rhetoric, prosody, and ethics, Spiegelman connects the Happy Warrior to the leech-gatherer of “Resolution and Independence,” to the sculptural presences of “Yew-Trees,” and to Wordsworth’s lifelong negotiation between action and contemplation (agere et pati). The result is a Wordsworth placed not at the margins as eccentric prophet but at the center of the “commonal” (to borrow Wallace Stevens), where the heroic becomes a shared vocation learned by imitation, memory, and speech.   Organized with the classroom and the scholar equally in mind, Wordsworth’s Heroes pairs thematic chapters on readers, children, and elders with sustained interpretations of The Prelude, The White Doe of Rylstone, and The Excursion. Spiegelman tracks how the “divisionary” imagination of the late poems turns characters into instructive exempla, while earlier lyrics test how far happiness, suffering, and endurance can be made heroic without losing their ordinariness. Along the way, the study situates Wordsworth among ancient and modern theorists of greatness—from Theophrastus and Cicero to Emerson, Carlyle, and Stevens—showing how his poetry both absorbs and resists heroic paradigms. This is scholarly criticism with the cadence of literary advocacy: lucid, historically alert, and attentive to how diction, syntax, and stanza shape ethical vision. For readers of Romanticism, narrative, and moral philosophy, Spiegelman offers a compelling case that Wordsworth’s truest heroes are “ourselves”—not exceptions to, but exponents of, the human commonwealth.   This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. 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