Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems

Paglia has clearly retreated from the limelight and is doing what she does best: teaching. You can argue with the book's subtitle (her pick of the world's best poems all happen to have been written in English); you can argue with her choices (at least when she gets into the late 20th century); and you can argue with the specifics of her analyses (she identifies Ralph Pomeroy's use of the word "craver" as a misprint for "craker," a type of crow); but you can't argue with her passion and commitment to careful, line-by-line reading of poetry. All of the poems discussed are short lyric poems which are reprinted in the volume (so you don't have to hunt them down). Most poems warrant 3 to 6 pages of discussion. Paglia does not ramble or reflect idly. These short essays are dense but lively, and clearly the distillation of many years' worth of teaching notes. Every sentence is a gem. Paglia provides biographical information on the poets' lives, but is not quick to assume that when a poet writes in the first person s/he is speaking about her/himself. On the other hand, where poets freight their works with many personal references, as Frank O'Hara does in "A Mexican Guitar," she acknowledges this fact while giving the reader permission to find delight in them without ever expecting to unlock all their mysteries. Her reading of Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" is worth the price of the book. I have despaired of ever seeing volume 2 of SEXUAL PERSONAE, where Paglia promised to go deeper into discussion of film and pop culture. But I was glad to have come across this little volume of thoughtful literary criticism. She definitely has renewed my interest in the Metaphysical poets, Whitman, Dickinson, Williams, and Roethke, among others.

Reading this book one poem per day will cause a emotional and spiritual depth charge to detonate in your unconscious. We had a great discussion in our book club. We waved the "read the whole book" rule and asked everyone to come with at least three poems that they had read deeply. We had a wonderful discussion on everything from the nature of poetry to Woodstock. Taste and see.

I have never appreciated more what Camille Paglia has done. How fortunate those several little known poets are to have caught her eye and thus be included in this wonderful treasure. Paglia now teaches at my alma mater and how difficult it is for me not to matriculate once again to bask in her indolence. But I am 80 now and have miles and miles to go.

For all those of you who have poopooed this work, PLEASE give me a break. Reading this work is like a glass of fine wine after a superb meal. OK I might be pedestrian and not totally aware of all the nuances,conceits, and refinements of "poetry", I do recall these several of these poems and their authors from a higher education of decades long past. If I had had a explicator like Ms. Paglia address these works I know I would have seen the beauty of them in a much greater light. Remember not everyone can understand string theory. I really was not keen to buying the book but I figured what the hey Camille is great writer, entertainer and most wonderfully an honest provocateur so I got it. And was I ever thrilled, I read this book the way I choose, picking the chapters that strike me, I read it in the moments when I am ready to go my past and experience something I knew, didn't know, thought I knew, or want to know. Half way through the book I have not been disapointed and will savor the final half as much as I have the first. So for all you prig reviewers out there who wish to let me know how I should view the world of the metaphorical word all I have to say to you is BREAK, BLOW, and BURN.

When I first read that Camille Paglia was working on a book about poetry my mind screamed: "Nooooo!!!! What is she thinking?" I had previously read rumors that she was penning a sequel to "Sexual Personae" that focused on contemporary society and the spectacle of paganism inherent in seemingly mundane events such as football games; I believe there was even a statement by her to that effect. But no, what she had been laboring on for years was not a tome-ish SexII but rather a slim pink book explaining poems from freshmen college courses. What. Was. She. Thinking? "Sexual Personae" is one of the few books I have read that had a profound influence on me, more profound than Joyce's "Ulysses." I remember first reading "Sexual Personae" in my (then) Central Park West apartment on a sunny morning overlooking the park. I didn't move for hours, only the shadows in the living room did. I had come to the book via a professor at Brooklyn College who read an excerpt from the Emily Dickenson chapter and thought she was marvelous. I was not expecting the scope of the book, my mind was overloaded as I went from century to century, art movement to art movement, reading psychosexual analysis of influential artists and philosophers and, concomitantly, Western civilization itself. Absurd liberal vagaries of truth were blown out of the water on virtually every page. Paglia, although a liberal herself, is too much of a brilliant straight shooter to buy into liberal fantasies and chic victimology. I have had three copies of the book since it came out in the mid-90s. "Sexual Personae" is a book you don't just read, you live with it. The two follow-ups, "Sex, Art, and American Culture" and "Vamps and Tramps" are by comparison essays cobbled together willy-nilly from the closet. They are fun, but reading them after "Sexual Personae" is like following up a dinner of filet mignon and dark red wine with pop-rocks. When I read that she was working on SPII, part of me did not like that she was going back to SP and simply rearranging the ivy of her laurels, but another encyclopedic pagan bible was preferable to another "Vamps and Tramps." What Paglia was really doing now seems to me in hindsight the only logical road to take: how do you follow up the sweeping, deep scarlet grandeur of "Sexual Personae"? You don't. "Break, Blow, Burn" made me fall in love with poetry again. I suppose I had never fallen out of love with it so let me put it this way: it put the passion back into my love for poetry. I read with trepidation the introductory sentence "I have tried to write concise commentaries on poetry that illuminate the text but also give pleasure in themselves as pieces of writing." Yes, "pleasure in themselves" while sitting alongside Donne's Holy Sonnets and William Blake's "London". Righto. My initial skepticism nothwithstanding, she actually succeeded, and what a pleasure it is to read her commentary. Paglia's Apollonian/Dionysian eternal struggle is left back in "Sexua