Sweet Youth: Poems

New Directions, 2002-09-17. Paperback. Like New. 8x5x0. Softcover. Good binding and cover. Minor shelf wear. Clean, unmarked pages. <br> "Allen Grossman (1932-2014), was one of the most powerful and original voices of 20th-century American poetry, a charismatic and influential teacher at Brandeis for more than three decades, a mentor to poets and scholars, and the author of many deep and searching reflections on poetics and the philosophy of poetry, Few poets have matched Grossman's depth and intellectual ambitions. For Grossman, poetry was a way of apprehending the meaning of being at its most fundamental level, and instrument for measuring the wholeness and integrity of the cosmos, and the brokenness and longing of all things human. Poetry is a register of the moral order of experience and of the metaphysical order of nature; most of all, it is a place where the 'I' of the poetic speaker and the 'You' of the poetic hearer together face the eternal things in whose light their engagement with each other matters, winning for each a kind of knowledge, and a kind of relationship, at the furthest edge of the ability of language to articulate and of minds to know. 'Poetry,' Grossman said, 'is a principle of power invoked by all of us against our vanishing. The making of poems is a practice, a work human beings can do – in which civilization has invested some part of its love of itself and the world. The poem is a trace of the will of all persons to be known and to make known and, therefore, to be at all. Insofar as love wills the existence of what it loves, the principle of poetry is a collective and perpetually renewed act of love that brings the world to mind, and mind to mind, as the speech of a person, at the moment of the vanishing of world and persons, which is every moment of conscious life. Poetry is one means by which human beings engage, as they can, in the maintenance of a human world in which they can meet one another, affirm one another, remember, see, and foresee one another.'"- Brandeis University