Starting with Poetry

This book isn't intended to be the last-or the latest-word on poetry. We haven't tried to say things that have never been said before. Instead, we have tried to say some of the first things about poetry, and to encourage the reader to come to his own conclusions. To help make this possible, Starting with Poetry includes many poems that have never appeared in a textbook before. We decided to include them because we feel that they represent the living reality of poetry today. New poetry, however, doesn't replace old poetry; it adds to it. For this reason, we have also included older poems. The sections titled "Response" encourage readers to write their own poems, in part to increase their understanding of other poets' techniques, and in part to help them discover their own "poetic vision." We also hope this book will reveal our own basic assumptions about poetry and will make our values come alive for the reader. The most basic assumption of the book is that poetry is a good thing-that it gives varying degrees of pleasure and by doing so makes its claim as a significant part of human life. Another assumption is that poetry, by focusing and intensifying our insights, is one means by which human beings can become more themselves, more aware of their own minds and places in the world. Because this book is a beginning, it leaves out more than it includes and thus leaves much for readers to discover on their own. Rather arbitrarily, we have for the most part ruled out the use of translations, since this seemed to raise problems both too large and too specialized for the book as we conceive it. Perhaps the biggest problem about translations is that poems from other cultures may seem more obscure than they really are when presented out of context, and we wanted a selection of poetry that seemed immediate and intelligible in terms of twentieth-century American experience. Readers who are fortunate enough to know a second language-or whose first language is not English-have another poetic world available to them. We have, however, included translations of traditional American Indian poetry because these poems served our purposes very well. Where necessary we have provided some clues to the cultural context in our discussion of the poems. Music is another large area that can be explored outside the book. Most songs are fatally injured by separating words from music, and thus we have chosen more "literary" than musical ballads and lyrics. This choice is not meant to imply a judgment of quality; the' combination of words and music has a vitality that simply cannot be fairly represented through print alone here the student must turn to the radio, the record player, and the concert. If our readers take our limitations for their own and stop exploring concepts wherever this book drops them, then we have failed in our primary purpose. The book attempts to stimulate rather than satisfy. It is to be subtracted from, added to, and argued with as its readers'