Promotional Information

Explores the idea that poetry is challenging--not just in the sense of "difficult," but in that it continually "challenges us to confront and pass through offence to active mental involvement."

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Introduction: Scandal and Offense

Part I. Historical: Attack and Defense

2. Attack

3. Defense

Part II. Theoretical: Four Offenses

4. Gesture

5. Drama

6. Fiction

7. Trope

Part III. Critical: Studies in Antithetical Offense

8. Vico and Blake: Poetic Logic as Offense

9. Blake and Joyce: Friends in Offense

10. Joyce Cary's Antitheticality and His Politics of Experience

11. Seamus Heaney's Criticism and the Antithetical

12. The Double Offense of Great Bad Poetry; or, McGonagal Apotheosized

Epilogue: Reminders Not Quite Gentle

Index

About the Author

Hazard Adams is professor emeritus of comparative literature, University of Washington, and founder and honorary senior fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory. His Critical Theory since Plato has served as a standard text in the field for more than three decades.

Reviews

"The Offense of Poetry has the unmistakable authority that emanates from the breadth and length of the author's experience as a critic and as a thinker about criticism and poetry. It's a book we need, which very few authors could give us." Charles Hartman, author of Free Verse "This admirable book is the full, logical, and pleasing development of a single theory about the nature and social function of imaginative writing. There are no books known to me that attempt anything like what Hazard Adams invents: a Blakian poetics with implications for the defense of literature and, by extension, the renewal of creativity in the field of criticism." Donald Wesling, author of Bakhtin and the Social Moorings of Poetry