Seamus Heaney's Nobel Lecture, captured here in Crediting Poetry, is a powerful defense of poetry as "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive politics and "world-sorrow." Beginning with the "creaturely existence" of his childhood in a thatched farmstead in rural County Derry, Heaney traces his path in "the wideness of language." It is a way forged by listening: to the "burbles and squeaks" of BBC and Radio Eireann...

Provides practical advice with checklists on the art of writing poetry.

Ellen Foster, fifteen years old, formidable, and back in North Carolina with a loving new foster mother, has written to the president of Harvard, asking for early admission. Having already crammed a lot of tragedy, adversity, and trauma into her young years, surely she's due something. In the meantime, she's got a lot on her plate: composing poetry and selling it to classmates; trying to tactfully back away from a marriage proposal from her best...

"Each of the twelve chapters of How Poems Get Made examines a specific aspect of the poetic medium: diction, syntax, rhythm, echo, figure, repetition, and more. Acclaimed poet and critic James Longenbach shows how a poet may manipulate these most basic elements of diction and syntax to create voice, image, tone, or song, and bring a poem to life. Why does a great lyric poem ask to be reread, even after we know it by heart? In How Poems Get Made, Longenbach...