A Little Book on Form

A wealth of vocabulary exists with which to talk about poetry in traditional formal terms. But the more intuitive, creative parts of a poet's work and processes are more elusive: if the most interesting aspect of the form is the shaping power of the essential, expressive gestures inside it, how do we come to language in which to speak about form as the search for the radiant shapes?the wholeness or brokenness?we experience inside powerful works of art?

In suggestive, informal ?notes,? former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award?winner Robert Hass thinks through the idea of a poem from its barest building blocks to the grand forms of elegy and ode through which poets across human cultures have investigated the shapes of grieving and desiring. Begun as a project for students of poetry, A Little Book on Form is anything but?Hass investigates the ancient roots of the poetic impulse, taking a wide-ranging look at the most intense experience of human thought and feeling in language.