Book
Till I end my song : a gathering of last poems / edited with commentaries by Harold Bloom.
Record details
- ISBN: 0061923052 (hc.)
- ISBN: 9780061923050 (hc.)
- ISBN: 0061923060 (pbk.)
- ISBN: 9780061923067 (pbk.)
- Physical Description: xxviii, 377 p. ; 24 cm.
- Edition: 1st ed.
- Publisher: New York : Harper, c2010.
Content descriptions
| Formatted Contents Note: | Prothalamion / Edmund Spenser -- from The ocean to Cynthia / Walter Ralegh -- from Astrophil and Stella : "Who will in fairest book" / Philip Sidney -- "Down in the depth of mine iniquity" / Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke -- Last verses : "So well I love thee" / Michael Drayton -- from Doctor Faustus / Christopher Marlowe -- from The tempest / William Shakespeare -- A hymn to God the father / John Donne -- from Pleasure reconciled to virtue / Ben Jonson -- The white island, or place of the blest / Robert Herrick -- Love (III) / George Herbert -- Dirge / James Shirley -- Of the last verses in the book / Edmund Waller -- from Samson Agonistes / John Milton -- On Mr. Milton's Paradise Lost / Andrew Marvell -- The night / Henry Vaughan -- from The secular masque / John Dryden -- Upon nothing / John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester -- The day of judgment / Jonathan Swift -- from The dunciad (Book IV) / Alexander Pope -- On the death of Dr. Robert Levet / Samuel Johnson -- The cast-away / William Cowper -- To the accuser who is the god of this world / William Blake -- Extempore effusion upon the death of James Hogg / William Wordsworth -- Epitaph / Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- Memory / Walter Savage Landor -- On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year / George Gordon, Lord Byron -- from The triumph of life / Percy Bysshe Shelley -- This living hand / John Keats -- Terminus / Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Elegiac verse / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -- from The rubaiyt̀ of Omar Khayym̀ / Edward Fitzgerald -- Crossing the bar / Alfred, Lord Tennyson -- prologue from Asolando / Robert Browning -- Last lines / Emily Jane Bront -͡- Night on the prairies / Walt Whitman -- Shelley's vision / Herman Melville -- Growing old / Matthew Arnold -- A ballad of past meridian / George Meredith -- Insomnia / Dante Gabriel Rossetti -- Passing away / Christina Rossetti -- The saddest noise / Emily Dickinson -- from The story of Sigurd the Volsung / William Morris -- Sonnet : between two seas / Algernon Charles Swinburne -- He never expected much / Thomas Hardy -- To R.B. / Gerard Manley Hopkins -- Low barometer / Robert Bridges -- Requiem / Robert Louis Stevenson -- from The ballad of Reading Gaol / Oscar Wilde -- They say my verse is sad / A.E. Housman -- The fabulists / Rudyard Kipling -- Cuchulain comforted / William Butler Yeats -- The dark angel / Lionel Johnson -- Why he was there / Edwin Arlington Robinson -- Monsieur qui passe / Charlotte Mew -- One more brevity / Robert Frost -- Liberty / Edward Thomas -- The lonely death / Adelaide Crapsey -- Of mere being / Wallace Stevens -- The world contracted to a recognizable image / William Carlos Williams -- Shadows / D.H. Lawrence -- Ejaculation / Elinor Wylie -- I have been warned / Robinson Jeffers -- from Little Gidding / T.S. Eliot -- Tetľestai / Conrad Aiken -- A worm fed on the heart of Corinth / Isaac Rosenberg -- To dear Daniel / Samuel Greenberg -- Futility / Wilfred Owen -- The dragonfly / Louise Bogan -- Fish food : an obituary to Hart Crane / John Brooks Wheelwright -- The broken tower / Hart Crane -- Black March / Stevie Smith -- Heart of autumn / Robert Penn Warren -- Missing dates / William Empson -- A lullaby / W.H. Auden -- Charon / Louis MacNiece -- In a dark time / Theodore Roethke -- To Walker Evans / James Agee -- Souls lake / Robert Fitzgerald -- Sonnet / Elizabeth Bishop -- Grief was to go out, away / Jean Garrigue -- Last poem / F.T. Prince -- Bone-flower elegy / Robert Hayden -- The first night of fall and falling rain / Delmore Schwartz -- Space walking / R.S. Thomas -- Staring at the sea on the day of the death of another / May Swenson -- Poem on his birthday / Dylan Thomas -- Henry's understanding / John Berryman -- Thinking of the lost world / Randall Jarrell -- Epilogue / Robert Lowell -- Language ah now you have me / W.S. Graham -- A silence / Amy Clampitt -- Aristocrats / Keith Douglas -- "The darkness and the light are both alike to thee" / Anthony Hecht -- Proverb / Kenneth Koch -- In view of the fact / A.R. Ammons -- Days of 1994 / James Merrill -- A winter daybreak above Vence / James Wright -- News from the dogs / Vicki Hearne -- The veiled suite / Agha Shahid Ali. |
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Poetry > History and criticism. Poetics. |
Available copies
- 1 of 1 copy available at GRPL.
BookList Review
Till I End My Song : A Gathering of Last Poems
Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Literary critic and scholar Bloom has a passion for literary assemblages. He is also ardent in his articulation of the psychological, philosophical, and spiritual roles literature, especially poetry, plays in life, and in coping with death. So who better than Bloom to gather poets' last poems? Bloom cites three kinds of last poems.' The first is the obvious, the final poems composed by the 100 poets he holds dear. The second are poems intended to mark the end, even though the poet continued to write, and the third are poems Bloom reads as an imaginative conclusion to a poetic career. His great favorites are here--Shakespeare, Milton, Yeats, Hopkins, Emerson, and Stevens, as well as Conrad Aiken, A. R. Ammons, James Merrill, Amy Clampitt, and Agha Shahid Ali. Bloom introduces each poet and poem with his signature blend of knowledge, ardor, and, facing his eightieth year, poignancy. These are poems that embrace change, time, life, the self, and death. Poems that have lasted and that will reverberate into the coming silence. A collection of surpassing splendor and resonance.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
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Library Journal Review
Till I End My Song : A Gathering of Last Poems
Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
"O I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as the day cannot,/ I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death" (Walt Whitman). As Bloom (Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale Univ.; The Western Canon) writes in his introduction, the choices here fall into three categories: literal "final poems," poems that were intended to mark the end of a career, and "imaginative conclusion[s] to poetic career[s]." Spanning 400-plus years and 100 poets, from Edmund Spenser to Agha Shahid Ali, these poems were chosen first for their artistic excellence. An introduction for each grounds it within historical context and the poet's career while sharing delightful tidbits. For example, Hart Crane's father invented Lifesavers, while Robert Frost said that his favorite poem was James Shirley's "Dirge." As this anthology reveals, too many promising poets died too young from war and disease. Regardless of whether readers agree with Bloom's assertion that Shakespeare is the "greatest of all writers in human history," many will praise Bloom's selection of last songs. In the words of F.T. Prince's "Last Poem": "Stand at the grave's head/ Of any common/ Man or woman,/ Thomas Hardy said,/ And in the silence/ What they were,/ Their life, becomes a poem." Verdict Essential for all poetry collections.-Karla Huston, Appleton Arts Ctr., WI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Publishers Weekly Review
Till I End My Song : A Gathering of Last Poems
Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Bloom may be the most famous poetry critic in the English language. As he approached his 80th birthday, he turned his critical faculties toward the subject of death: this surprisingly enjoyable anthology contains the last poems-or the poems that most profoundly contemplate "lastness"-by 100 poets, from Edmund Spenser (d. 1599) to Agha Shahid Ali (d. 2001). Bloom seeks to show, through his selections and commentaries on each poem, that death can be as much an inspiration as a terror. With their last breaths, these poets address God (as John Donne does: "Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,/ Which is my sin, though it were done before?"); future generations (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his "Epitaph," tells those who pass his gravestone, "Beneath this sod/ A poet lies" who "Found death in life" and who hopes to "find life in death!"); a vast public and private self (Frost said, "I opened the door so my last look/ Should be taken outside a house and book"). James Wright finds a new kind of life in the apprehension of his mortality: "How can I feel so warm/ Here in the dead center of January?" Throughout, Bloom's brief prose comments illuminate and entertain. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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