Name: Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, Paperback/Christian Wiman
Brand: Copper Canyon Press
Price: 124.99 RON
Availability: InStock

Descriere & specificații

"Blazing high style" is how The New York Times describes the prose of Christian Wiman, the young editor who transformed Poetry , the country's oldest literary magazine. Ambition and Survival is a collection of stirring personal essays and critical prose on a wide range of subjects: reading Milton in Guatemala, recalling violent episodes of his youth, and traveling in Africa with his eccentric father, as well as a series of penetrating essays on writers as diverse as Thomas Hardy and Janet Lewis. The book concludes with a portrait of Wiman's diagnosis of a rare form of incurable and lethal cancer, and how mortality reignited his religious passions. When I was twenty years old I set out to be a poet. That sounds like I was a sort of frigate raising anchor, and in a way I guess I was, though susceptible to the lightest of winds. . . . When I read Samuel Johnson's comment that any young man could compensate for his poor education by reading five hours a day for five years, that's exactly what I tried to do, practically setting a timer every afternoon to let me know when the little egg of my brain was boiled. It's a small miracle that I didn't take to wearing a cape. Praise for Ambition and Survival "That calling, at once religious, ethical, and aesthetic, is one that only a genuine poet can hear--and very few poets can explain it as compellingly as Mr. Wiman does. That gift is what makes Ambition and Survival , not just one of the best books of poetry criticism in a generation, b