The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics [antikvár]

PREFACE This is a book of knowledge, of facts, theories, questions, and informed judgment, about poetry. Its aim is to provide a comprehensive, comparative, reasonably advanced, yet readable reference for all students, teachers, scholars, poets, or general readers who are interested in the history of any poetry in any national literature of the world, or in any aspect of the technique or criticism of poetry. It provides surveys of 106 national poetries^ descriptions of poetic forms and genres major and minor, traditional and emergent; detailed explanations of the devices of prosody and rhetoric; and overviews of all major schools of poetry ancient and modern, Western and Eastern. It provides balanced and comprehensive accounts of the major movements and issues in criticism and literary theory, and discussion of the manifold relations of poetry to the other fields of human thought and activity—history, science, politics, religion, philosophy, music, the visual arts. This third edition follows upon the first edition of 1965, supplemented in 1974, which was well received and which has been consulted, over the years, by countless readers both in America and abroad: indeed, one Burmese scholar wrote us to say " there are relatively few books in our library, and the Princeton Encyclopedia is one of the most heavily used of all. We have few good accounts of English poetry available to us here; indeed, we have few reliable accounts of Burmese poetry either. We send our students to the Encyclopedia for both." In late 1984, when the Editors agreed to undertake a third edition, it was obvious to all that what would be required would be almost entirely a new text. The period since 1965 has been a time of extraordinarily vigorous, almost dizzying change in literary studies: both the amount and the variety of work has increased geometrically over that prior to 1965, with the result that issues of interpretation, history, gender, culture, and theory now dominate the critical scene which were largely unknown in 1965. The same can be said for developments in the poetries of Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America: recent political changes in these areas of the world have been swift, extensive, and complex, resulting in burgeoning national literatures. All told, the last 25 years have witnessed enormous changes in both the practice of criticism in the West and also the writing of poetry around the world.