Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. To Start 1
4. Part 1 Something Speaks to Me (Intimacy)
5. Feeling the Pulse of the Text 9
6. Some Examples 12
7. Poetic Criticism, an Essay 17
8. Roland Barthes Has Sushi 18
9. What Does the Text Want from Me? 20
10. The Impersonality of Intimacy 24
11. The Texture of Intimacy 25
12. Productive Distrust 28
13. Learning to Unlearn 30
14. Naïveté 32
15. Intimacy, Self-Taught 34
16. The Call of Significance 34
17. The Authority of the Poetic 37
18. Being in History 38
19. Being in the Same History (Tradition) 40
20. A Bastard of History 43
21. Part 2 I Must Tell You About It (Urgency)
22. Understanding and Making 49
23. Making the New by Remaking the Old 53
24. Learning Not to Conclude 56
25. Tact 60
26. Playing It by Ear 64
27. Poetic Making Conserves as It Renews 67
28. Poetic Power 71
29. Philological Disarmament 77
30. Hearing That We May Speak 79
31. Second Thoughts 81
32. Self-Reference versus Urgency 82
33. Epiphanies 85
34. The Intense Life of Language 88
35. What and How 90
36. The Knot of Experience 92
37. Making Freedom 96
38. Part 3 But I Don’t Know How (Opacity)
39. Shadow in Plain Sight 103
40. The Difficulty of Criticism 108
41. The Strange Voice 110
42. Aristotle versus Plato 113
43. What in Technique Is More Than Technique 115
44. What Kind of Thing Is the Poetic Thing? 116
45. The Work of Art versus the Poetic Work 119
46. The Eye of the Work, the Eye of the Beholder 121
47. How to Leap Over One’s Own Shadow 123
48. Why Non-Knowing Is the Primal Condition of Poetry 127
49. Genius 128
50. Criticism Is Making 132
51. The Poet of the Poet 133
52. Falling 135
53. The Difficulty, and the Ecstasy, of Reality 139
54. Is Poetry a Deflection from Life? 142
55. In Poetry, Non-Knowing Is a Primal Condition 143
56. The Social Force of the Impersonal 147
57. To Be Continued . . . 153
58. Acknowledgments 157
59. Notes 159
60. Index 165