A Difficult Grace: On Poets, Poetry, and Writing

by Michael Ryan

“[In] preliterate societies, even those as late as ancient Greece and Anglo-Saxon England, the poet is the ideologue, historian, theologian, philosopher, TV, newspaper, Internet, and megamultiplex cinema rolled into one”--so begins Michael Ryan’s lively description of the cultural context of ancient poetry, in pointed contrast to that of poetry now. Informed by his own experience as a poet and writer, A Difficult Grace examines the lives and works of Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Whitman, Frost, Bishop, and Stevens (as well as other poets and writers before and since), deftly combining literary history, critical writing by the writers themselves, and Ryan's expert understanding of their work. The result is a collection of powerfully argued essays written in a style easily accessible to a wide range of readers. Attending to the difficult graces of form, structure, rhythm, and technique, Ryan illuminates the unifying subject of his book: the vocation of the poet and the writer in the contemporary world. This is an essential book for both writers and readers.

Genres: Poetry

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Poet and memoirist Michael Ryan was born in St Louis, Missouri. He studied at the University of Notre Dame and Claremont Graduate School, and earned an MFA and PhD from the University of Iowa.

Ryan’s first volume, Threats Instead of Trees (1974), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. His second collection, In Winter (1981), was selected by Louise Glück for the National Poetry Series. God Hunger (1989) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and his New and Selected Poems (2004) was awarded the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.

Over the course of his long career, Ryan has been praised for his formal control and, in the words of David Baker, his ability "to turn the apparently personal into the public and important." Writing in The Nation, William H. Pritchard alleged that Ryan "reminds us on every page that poems can be about lives, and about them in ways most urgent and delicate."

An acclaimed memoirist, Ryan's Secret Life (1995) was a New York Times Notable Book. His second memoir, Baby B (2004), was excerpted in The New Yorker. He has also published a book of essays on poetry, A Difficult Grace (2000).

Ryan has received numerous prizes for poetry, including a Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has taught at such institutions as the University of Iowa (where he was an editor of The Iowa Review), Southern Methodist University, Goddard College, Warren Wilson College, and the University of California-Irvine, where he has been a Professor of English and Creative Writing since 1990.


(Poetry Foundation, 2011)