Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language

Demonstrating a poet’s imaginative ear and a critic’s range of concern, John Hollander here writes about the "melodious guile" with which poetry speaks to us. Through analysis of formal and rhetorical patterns in examples chosen from the whole spectrum of English and American poetry, Hollander describes how poems form self-reflexive parable in order to represent realms beyond themselves.
"As astute a book about poetry as anyone has produced in the last five years."—David Lehman, Newsday
"A l...