Books by Hazard Adams

Rich with imagery and enlivened with a wry and witty sensibility, this title features poems that opens with a series of strong, spare, bitter sweet elegies to the author's parents and grandparents and to his own rural beginnings as he wrestles with the shifting roles of child and man, actor and observer.

There is something offensive about poetry, judging by the number of attacks on it and defences of it. The author argues that poetry exists to offend - not through its subject matter but through the challenges it presents to the prevailing view of what language is for. He also specifies four poetic offences - gesture, drama, fiction, and trope.

A seminal figure in Romantic poetry and visual arts, William Blake continues to influence modern literary criticism. In this book, Blake scholar Hazard Adams presents a selection of essays that span his long career exploring the work and thought of the groundbreaking artist. Topics range from the symbolic form in Blake's poem Jerusalem, the world view of Blake in relation to cultural policy and the notion of contrariety in Blake's writings to the relation of Chinese literary thought to that of the West, the critical work of Northrop Frye and Murray Krieger and the cultural and academic status of the humanities. The essays chart the evolution of Adams' own neo-Blakean literary thought over the past four decades, chronicling an effort to seek not merely a method but a philosophical base for the practice of literary criticism.

There is something offensive and scandalous about poetry, judging by the number of attacks on it and defenses of it written over the centuries. Poetry, Hazard Adams argues, exists to offend - not through its subject matter but through the challenges it presents to the prevailing view of what language is for. Poetry's main cultural value is its offensiveness; it should be defended as offensive.Adams specifies four poetic offenses - gesture, drama, fiction, and trope - and devotes a chapter to each, ranging across the landscape of traditional literary criticism and exploring the various attitudes toward poetry, including both attacks and defenses, offered by writers from Plato and Aristotle to Sidney, Vico, Blake, Yeats, and Seamus Heaney, among others. "e;Criticism,"e; Adams writes, "e;needs renewal in every age to free poetry from the prejudices of that age and the unintended prejudices of even the best critics of the past, to free poetry to perform its provocative, antithetical cultural role."e;Poetry achieves its cultural value by opposing the binary oppositions - form and content, fact and fiction, reason and emotion - that structure and polarize most understandings of literature and of life. Adams takes a position antithetical to the extremes of both abstract formalism and the politicization of literary content. He concludes with an appreciation of what he calls the double offense of "e;great bad poetry,"e; poetry so exceptionally bad that it transcends its shortcomings and leads to gaiety. He reminds us that Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, identified angels with the settled and coercive and assigned the qualities of energy and creativity to his devils. According to Adams, poetry, in its broad and traditional sense of all imaginative writing, may be identified with Blake's devils.