Melodies Unheard : Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry / / Anthony Hecht.

• Author: Hecht, Anthony, 1923-2004.
• Language: English
• Series: Johns Hopkins, poetry and fiction.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (1 online resource (304 pages))
• Notes: Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.; The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License; Originally published as Johns Hopkins Press in 2003

The fruit of a lifetime's reading and thinking about literature, its delights and its responsibilities, this book by acclaimed poet and critic Anthony Hecht explores the mysteries of poetry, offering profound insight into poetic form, meter, rhyme, and meaning. Ranging from Renaissance to contemporary poets, Hecht considers the work of Shakespeare, Sidney, and Noel Housman, Hopkins, Eliot, and Auden Frost, Bishop, and Wilbur Amichai, Simic, and Heaney. Stepping back from individual poets, Hecht muses on rhyme and on meter, and also discusses St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians and Melville's Moby-Dick. Uniting these diverse subjects is Hecht's preoccupation with the careful deployment of words, the richness and versatility of language and of those who use it well.

Table of Contents

Shakespeare and the sonnet -- The sonnet: ruminations on form, sex, and history -- Sidney and the sestina -- On Henry Noel's "Gaze not on swans" -- Technique in Housman -- On Hopkins' "The Wreck of the Deutschland" -- Uncle Tom's shantih -- Paralipomena to The Hidden law -- On Robert Frost's "The Wood-pile" -- Two poems by Elizabeth Bishop -- Richard Wilbur: an introduction -- Yehuda Amichai -- Charles Simic -- Seamus Heaney's prose -- Moby-Dick -- St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians -- On rhyme -- The music of forms.