Break, Blow, Burn

by Camille Paglia

America’s most provocative intellectual brings her blazing powers of analysis and appreciation to bear on the great poems of the Western tradition, and on some unexpected discoveries of her own. Combining close reading with a panoramic breadth of learning, Camille Paglia refreshes our understanding of poems we thought we knew, from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73” to Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” from Donne’s “The Flea” to Lowell’s “Man and Wife,” and from Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” to Plath’s “Daddy.”

 Paglia also introduces us to less-familiar works by Paul Blackburn, Wanda Coleman, Chuck Wachtel, Rochelle Kraut–and even Joni Mitchell. Daring, riveting, and beautifully written, Break, Blow, Burn will excite even seasoned poetry lovers, and create a generation of new ones.

 Includes a new epilogue that details the selection process for choosing the 43 poems presented in this book and provides commentary on some of the pieces that didn't make the final cut.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Essays, Criticism, History, Feminism

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Camille Anna Paglia is an American social critic, author and teacher. Her book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, published in 1990, became a bestseller. She is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

She has been variously called the "feminist that other feminists love to hate," a "post-feminist feminist," one of the world's top 100 intellectuals by the UK's Prospect Magazine, and by her own description "a feminist bisexual egomaniac."

Reviews

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

All in all, this is one of the most useful books on poetry I've ever read.

For Break Blow Burn, Paglia selected, as the garish but intriguing pink and black cover says, forty-three of the world's best poems (from expected choices like Shakespeare to surprising, quirky inclusions like Joni Mitchell) and explicated them. As always, she is scintillating, sensual and enticingly campy and controversial and her prose is beautiful. She labored a long time on this short work, but it never feels labored. Quite the contrary, she seems to have mastered the art of wringing as much out of a poem in as brief a space as possible; her explications have all the quick perfection of a Borges essay.

Paglia's enthusiasm for poetry is infectious, and her respect for these great works led her to make an aesthetic decision that I can't praise highly enough. In an interview, she expressed her distaste for the way poems run together in Norton Anthologies of poetry, and she chooses here to give an individual page for each poem, like a painting occupying its own space of a museum wall. This may seem like a minor detail, but the fatigue of the eye those collections cause is a greater enemy to the general reader than the actual difficulty of the poetry in question. Paglia understands the needs of the general audience and meets them, which is what makes Break Blow Burn such a great read. Her insight is profound, and, although there can never be a definitive reading of a great poem, that thought does not much enter the mind when reading Paglia's seemingly authoritative interpretations; although she is a celebrator of popular culture and is scorned by the bourgeois establishment, she is a truly remarkable writer and critic, and this book is a joy from start to finish.

Thanks to the proliferation of post-structuralism, Marxism, and all the other components of Bloom's School of Resentment, the art of close reading of poetry has been sadly neglected in recent decades. I truly hope this gem of a book is the start of a resurgent trend.

[Uroš Đurković · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ova knjiga izgrađena je na jednom krajnje jednostavnom konceptu – Palja piše 43 kratka eseja – analize razlčitih pesama – od Šekspira i Džona Dona (od čijeg je stiha pozajmljen naslov dela), sve do Džoni Mičel. U ovom poštovanja vrednom rasponu, Palja pokazuje svoju interpretativnu suverenost, podjednako dinamično pišući o Blejku, Emili Dikinson, Silviji Plat ili Geriju Snajderu.

Svako ko je imao prilike da pogleda neki Paljin javni nastup, primetiće kako zna da bude ne samo zabavno, već i izuzetno naporno pratiti njen misaoni tok, jer joj reči jure misli kao gazele na federima. Pričajući kao navijena, Palja uspeva da se posvađa sa sobom, sa čitaocem, sa prethodnim interpretativnim ćorsokacima, ali ujedno i da intrigira, provocira, razbistri um. Ne pristajući na sve prisutniju teorijsku inerciju u humanistici, u kojoj svako sledeće čitanje postaje prepričavanje prepričavanja sa političkom dimenzijom, Palja odbija Bartovu smrt autora, političku korektnost, kao i danas preovlađujući „distant reading”. Ukoliko odustanemo od autonomije književnog teksta, tumačeći ga samo kao rezultat kulture, ostaćemo uskraćeni za nešto što je bio sasvim jedinstven oblik izražavanja ljudskog iskustva. Opet, nemoguće je i, uostalom, nepotrebno, izolovati tekst od svega onoga što je van teksta, jer svaki tekst predstavlja poziv za ostvarivanje svih mogućih njegovih veza sa vantekstualnim svetom. Tako Palja pronalazi dobru meru i podseća nas na nešto što se čini očiglednim – tekst književnost je i autonomna i rezultat kulture i najbolji put do nje nije zaobilazni, pod okriljem nekakve teorije, već neposredno – čitanjem.

Najbolji način za čitanje Paljinih čitanja jeste nasumičan izbor. Sasvim je dovoljno izdvojiti nekoliko pesama koje nekom deluje zanimljivo i pročitati eseje o njima. Ipak, ako neko pročita celu knjigu, videće da postoje neizrečene paralele između sasvim raznorodnih pesnika. Iako nigde ne govori o istorijskoj uslovljenosti dela, Palja pokazuje dijahronu komunikaciju tema i motiva, od kojih prednjače prikazi tela i prirode. Tako bi neko mogao da izvuče više zanimljivih linija tradicije.

Takođe, ovo je knjiga, iako neretko sa izvrsnim zaključcima (posebno su mi u sećanju ostali eseji o Blejku, Vitmenu i Vordsvortu), pisana za ljude koji nisu književni insajderi. S jedne strane to je dobro – eseji su dostupniji široj publici, sa druge strane, ponekad se pažnja posvećuje nečemu što je krajnje osnovno (poput – šta je sonet), da bi se na sledećoj stranici otvorilo neko veliko užestručno pitanje, poput teorije referencijalnosti, diskurzivnosti roda ili mehanicističke verzije prirode kod Dekarta i Njutna. Uz to, postoji i izvesna neujednačenost u izboru pesnika. Prosto, Teodor Retke, iako zanimljiv autor, nije Džon Don.

Bilo kako bilo, uzbudljiva knjiga, koja može da da makar blagi podsticaj, da književna misao izleči svoje rahitične noge.

[Theo Logos · Rating 5 out of 5]

”I sound out poems silently, as others pray.”


Camille Paglia possesses exactly the sensibilities needed to re-invigorate poetry as a popular art form. Her iconoclastic intellect together with a preternatural attunement to pop culture sensibilities uniquely qualifies her to this mission. With Break, Blow, Burn, (a title that screams rock & roll, yet is extracted from John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV) her close readings of forty-three selected poems from Shakespeare to Joni Mitchell proves the point, as Paglia notes it may be the only volume of poetry criticism ever to reach the national bestseller list in the United States.

Paglia was committed to choosing poems and writing for the general reader, “especially those who may not have read a poem since college.” In her epilogue, she is characteristically blunt about the poets and poems she left out and why, as exampled here, writing of Ezra Pound:

”I could not find a single usable Pound poem — just a monotonous series of showy, pointless, arcane allusions to prior literature.”

The poems that she did include are impressive and eclectic. Her brilliant readings of them are informed by her close attention to culture, sexuality, and sexual and gender politics. Her take on old favorites, such as Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress, Shelly’s Ozymandias, and Coleridge’s Kubla Khan gave me new eyes to read them. She also included poets I had previously not read, but will now seek out, such as Jean Toomer, Chuck Wachtel, and Rochelle Kraut. Most impressive of all, Paglia’s reading of William Carlos Williams’s This Is Just To Say utterly transformed the way I understand it. Previously it had not impressed me. After Paglia’s close reading of it, my mind is blown.

Break, Blow, Burn is not a book to rush through. You will want to savor each poem, contemplate it along with Paglia’s insightful close readings. I started reading it back in April, as part of my poetry month reading, but found that I needed the equivalent of a semester to fully appreciate this master class of poetry appreciation that Paglia has provided.

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that I respected much more than I enjoyed.

Break, Blow, Burn was recommended to me in preparation for Oxford's entrance exam but I think this only made it all the more daunting. Paglia's searing powers of analysis and her stunning prose are unparalleled; she is indeed an 'academic rottweiler'.

Paglia breaks down an extremely diverse range of poetry all the way from Shakespeare to Pomeroy, and even Joni Mitchell makes a guest appearance. The contextual details were fascinating, but the references to American culture and associated jargon went straight over my head.

Nothing like I've ever read before and incredibly insightful. My favourite chapters included Donne's The Flea, Shelley's Ozymandias, Coleridge's Kebula Khan, Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop For Death and Roethke's The Visitant.

What is it they say about the aspirational nature of readership?!

CAN I PLEASE HAVE PAGLIA'S BRAIN!!

[Carol Storm · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book of poetry criticism I have ever read. Better than four years at Columbia College! My favorite sections are the ones on Ozymandias by Percy Shelley and Daddy by Sylvia Plath. But it is regrettable that she included "Woodstock" by Joni Mitchell. That's not rock and roll. That's just dated hippie crap. "Too Much Monkey Business" or "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" by Chuck Berry would have been more daring (and more colorful.)

If you have to shoehorn a Sixties rock song into a book of classic poems, why pick "Woodstock?" Why not "Yellow Submarine?" Why not "Eleanor Rigby?" Why not "Like A Rolling Stone?" I understand that "Woodstock" is important because it was written by a woman. And because it's about people coming together to fight pure evil and save the world. But then, why not include "Battle Hymn of the Republic" by Julia Ward Howe?

Including "Woodstock" in this book was a big mistake. It's not fair to the Sixties. It's not fair to rock and roll. It's not even fair to Joni Mitchell, who could be much more playful and ironic in her songs about personal relationships than when she was peer-pressured by her boyfriends into taking a quick stab at political sloganeering. Including "Woodstock" in this book suggests a profound ignorance about both the origins of rock and roll and the meaning of race in America.

When Camille Paglia analyzes Sylvia Plath's Daddy she's perfectly within her rights to call Sylvia Plath a female rocker. But rock and roll in the Fifties was much more than "good time tunes for teenagers." Chuck Berry is the father of rock and roll, and he paid dues Joni Mitchell never had to pay. He was also more grown up at thirty than Sylvia Plath ever lived to be. It's unfortunate that Chuck Berry's poetry is excluded from this remarkable book.

[Edward · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first read that Camille Paglia was working on a book about poetry my mind screamed: Nooooo!!!! What is she thinking? I had previously read rumors that she was penning a sequel to Sexual Personae that focused on contemporary society and the spectacle of paganism inherent in seemingly mundane events such as football games; I believe there was even a statement by her to that effect. But no, what she had been laboring on for years was not a tome-ish SexII but rather a slim pink book explaining poems from freshmen college courses. What. Was. She. Thinking?

Sexual Personae is one of the few books I have read that had a profound influence on me, more profound than Joyce's Ulysses. I remember first reading Sexual Personae in my (then) Central Park West apartment on a sunny morning overlooking the park. I didn't move for hours, only the shadows in the living room did. I had come to the book via a professor at Brooklyn College who read an excerpt from the Emily Dickenson chapter and thought she was marvelous. I was not expecting the scope of the book, my mind was overloaded as I went from century to century, art movement to art movement, reading psychosexual analysis of influential artists and philosophers and, concomitantly, Western civilization itself. Absurd liberal vagaries of truth were blown out of the water on virtually every page. Paglia, although a liberal herself, is too much of a brilliant straight shooter to buy into liberal fantasies and chic victimology. I have had three copies of the book since it came out in the mid-90s. Sexual Personae is a book you don't just read, you live with it.

The two follow-ups, Sex, Art, and American Culture and Vamps and Tramps are by comparison essays cobbled together willy-nilly from the closet. They are fun, but reading them after Sexual Personae is like following up a dinner of filet mignon and dark red wine with pop-rocks. When I read that she was working on SPII, part of me did not like that she was going back to SP and simply rearranging the ivy of her laurels, but another encyclopedic pagan bible was preferable to another Vamps and Tramps. What Paglia was really doing now seems to me in hindsight the only logical road to take: how do you follow up the sweeping, deep scarlet grandeur of Sexual Personae?

You don't.

Break, Blow, Burn made me fall in love with poetry again. I suppose I had never fallen out of love with it so let me put it this way: it put the passion back into my love for poetry. I read with trepidation the introductory sentence "I have tried to write concise commentaries on poetry that illuminate the text but also give pleasure in themselves as pieces of writing." Yes, "pleasure in themselves" while sitting alongside Donne's Holy Sonnets and William Blake's "London". Righto. My initial skepticism notwithstanding, she actually succeeded, and what a pleasure it is to read her commentary. Paglia's Apollonian/Dionysian eternal struggle is left back in Sexual Personae. The scope here is not cosmic/historical struggle but individual vision. In this sense Break, Blow, Burn is microscopic, not telescopic, it is measured, not breathless. How refreshing to have Paglia turn her high-powered perception from something grand like Western history and Western sexual identity to something tiny, like a poem. For that the book is tighter, intimate, and not scattered like V&T and Sex, Art, and American Culture. The poems are great and it's evident that she is phenomenal at explicating them. The poems, most of them no more than a page, are imbued with a richness that Paglia masterfully shines light on, fulfilling her goal to "illuminate" them.

If you had told me months ago that I would be reading a hot pink book about famous poems while on the subway to work I would've laughed. Far from laughing, I'm grateful to Camille Paglia. This book is a 180 degree turn from Sexual Personae and it's both brilliant and surprising for being just that. At the same time, it's a burrowing into the themes of Sexual Personae - it's the raw poetry and fire of Sexual Personae without the epic, without crossing an eon of human history. The passion of a few humans in isolated, ethereal moments is condensed here and it's wickedly beautiful. Paglia most certainly knows this and is hypnotized by it as much as we are even as she shows us the intricacies of these strange fruit.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can hear Paglia's disappointment when she writes, "Along the way I've encountered so many people in the publishing world, in magazines, who said to me, you know, 'I always keep up with the new novels, but not poetry.' These are really literary people, and even they feel poetry no longer speaks to them."

Paglia suggests an explanation for the decline in the love of poetry, "Thanks to 25 years of post-structuralism in our elite colleges, we have this idea now that you are supposed to use your pseudo-sociological critical eye to look down on the work and find everything that's wrong with it," ...this style of teaching just nips students' enthusiasm in the bud."

Paglia's readings of the poems are just right: clear, concise, and not overdone. The poems she selected are, for the most part, logical choices; some may think Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock" is not on the same level with Marvel's "To His Coy Mistress." I disagree. Some of Paglia's more unusual choices are great, such as Blackburn's "The Once-Over," which is a severely underappreciated work by a too-little-known poet. It contains the voyeurism and sexual freedom that Paglia cherishes.

from "The Once-Over:

The tanned blond
in the green print sack
in the center of the subway car
standing
tho there are seats
has had it from
1 teen-age hood
1 lesbian
1 envious housewife
4 men over fifty
(& myself)

So.
She has us and we her
all the way to downtown Brooklyn
Over the tunnel and through the bridge
to DeKalb Avenue we go
all very chummy

she stares at the number over the door
and gives no sign
yet the sign is on her

If there were a centerpiece in the masterful collection, I'd go with Sylvia Plath's acidic angst - "Daddy" - the longest at a mere 80 lines. As Plath rants abuses of her dead father in a style so extreme Paglia observes that while Plath may have many imitators, "she may have exhausted her style in creating it." Paglia, ever breaking the mold, is hardly another critic heaping awe on the iconic Plath. Rather, she challenges the poet's victimhood - the justification of casting her father as Hitler - the incongruence of Plath's "comfortable middleclass upbringing and privileged education with the unspeakable annals of `Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen." "What atrocities did (Plath) suffer?" she asks.

This is probably the most outrageous, but still academic book of poetry criticism I've read. I love the pink cover. Highly recommended!

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am admittedly a sucker for any academic willing to bitch in print about the state of the English dept in 2016 and the soul-sucking post-structuralist swamp we find ourselves lost in, and so Paglia, brash lesbian Freudian feminist from Philly, is of course a natural selection for this evening's reading. Will get back to you.

EDIT: Pretty silly in places, insightful in others, always entertaining, plus the neon pink cover is gaudy in the best way. Ultimately most valuable for her embrace of a pre-postmodern approach to poetry explication, one unhampered by French Theory, than most of the explications themselves. Also, Paglia has turned me on to John Donne. Would love to hear her take on Hart Crane!

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish there were more collections of poetry like this one. It isn't just a fine selection of works, but Paglia includes essays giving context and commentary. It's like a freshman seminar from a professor with a strong viewpoint. I often find it difficult to read poetry cold and it's hard to find books that give similar context. I highly recommend this approach.

[Parksy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cool book of the best poems broken down line by line.

From Publishers Weekly
The still-vocal critic of Sexual Personae, a book that drew on poetry and painting for its de-deconstructions of gender, checks in with an anthology of 43 poems, along with her own close readings of them. Her introduction offers a jumble of justifications for undertaking such a project (though she is "unsure whether the West's chaotic personalism can prevail against the totalizing creeds that menace it," she hopes it will), but the readings themselves reveal Paglia's fascination with poetry, which she likens "to addiction or to the euphoria of being in love." The book's first half presents canonical work that Paglia has found "most successful in the classroom" (Shakespeare, Blake, Dickinson, etc.). The second features mostly canonical modernist and confessional work (Stevens, Williams, Toomer, Roethke and Plath), with a few more recent pieces. Clocking in mostly at two to four pages, Paglia's readings sound a lot like classroom preambles to discussion—offering background, lingering over provocative lines, venturing provisional interpretations. Some of what she says comes off as grandiose (Roethke's " 'Cuttings' is a regrounding of modern English poetry in lost agrarian universals"), some as boilerplate, some as inspired. Though hit-and-miss, Paglia's picks and appraisals provide the requisite spark for jump-starting returns to poetry. (Apr. 1)

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
A volcanic mountain has labored, and brought forth a mouse: The sexy celebrity bad-girl cultural critic of the '90s has produced a flawed but serviceable brief textbook.

A professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Camille Paglia won acclaim and even notoriety with Sexual Personae (1990) whose 700-plus pages emphasized the "amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism and pornography in great art," from prehistory to Emily Dickinson and Henry James. Since then she has become a prolific commentator on popular culture and film. By these standards, Break, Blow, Burn is modest: It tries to introduce good, accessible short poems in English and to help readers enjoy them as Paglia does.

That is what good teachers do, and the first three-quarters of the book follows through, offering patient, vigorous and largely uncontroversial explication of poems by Shakespeare, Donne (whom her title quotes), Wordsworth, Coleridge and others. Obsolete double meanings, obsolescent things (a root cellar, for example) and, especially, biblical references need old-fashioned explanations, which Paglia provides with skill.

She also proves entertainingly willing to say not only what a poem does and means, but why she likes it. Some sentences sound outrageous but in fact offer imaginative guidance, as when Paglia imagines William Blake roaming London "with telepathic hearing and merciless X-ray eyes" or explains Walt Whitman's universe as "a plush matrix or webwork of gummy secretions."

It's hard to show introductory-level students how poems speak to one another across generations when those students come to class having read so few. Paglia surmounts that problem by comparing the poems she's chosen to one another, even when such comparisons may not be what the poets had in mind.

Her obsessions can interfere with her aims. Paglia sees paintings or movies almost every time she looks at a poem. Shakespeare has "a Mannerist sophistication"; one poem of Donne's "resembles Surrealist art," and another proves "analogous to Caravaggio." Shelley's "Ozymandias" recalls "Raphael's revealing 1518 portrait" of Pope Leo X, even though the poet's "technique resembles that of the motion picture camera." Wallace Stevens's "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" "prefigures the psychedelic flamboyance of Pop Art." (She does better with Stevens than that miscue implies, as when she contends, for example, that his famous "jar in Tennessee" may contain moonshine.)

Paglia also sees sex everywhere -- in Donne, Whitman and Theodore Roethke, where it really is everywhere, but also in George Herbert and Wordsworth, where it isn't. She gets Herbert's dense, gloomy "Church-monuments" just right but his much-admired "Love (III)" badly wrong, turning a pellucid lyric of agape into an unrecognizable "languid, hypnotic" drama of "tumescence and penetration." Paglia's constant search for images of coitus makes her not a taboo-breaking innovator but a throwback to the Freudian critics of her youth.

It also limits her tastes, especially in the last quarter of this book. "Art making," for Paglia, "draws on primitive, amoral, erotic energies." She is attracted, understandably, to poets who share that view and avoids poets whose best work tends to confute it: no Pope, Auden, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop or Marianne Moore. Instead we get "a hipster's syncopated ode to female sexual power," by Paul Blackburn (not a bad poem, by the way), a 10-page exegesis of Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" ("one of the strongest poems ever written by a woman"), three poems by Roethke and nothing else by Plath. As the selections approach the present, they grow stranger and harder to defend.

In her introduction, Paglia suggests that today's "most honored poets" are overrated, describing their "poetic language" as "stale and derivative." It should be no wonder, then, that she omits almost all of them. The contemporary poems she does choose come from several styles and schools (May Swenson's precisionism, Gary Snyder's Zen notation, Norman H. Russell's Midwestern plain speech, Chuck Wachtel's collage, Wanda Coleman's performance-oriented directness). All, however, share an absence of surface complexity: You can think hard about these poems if you want, but you won't have to decode any abstractions or unravel intricate syntax to "get" them.

Paglia concludes with the words to Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock," a wonderful song about which she says baffling things: "This is an important modern poem -- possibly the most popular and influential poem composed in English since Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy.' " The clichéd overstatement seems harmless, but the casual dismissal of all contemporary page-based poetry is not. Nor is the cavalier attitude toward music history: Is "Woodstock" more influential than "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Anarchy in the U.K." or "Rapper's Delight"? After 200 pages of handy exegeses, it's a shame that Paglia ends her book with what looks less like literary (or cultural) criticism than a bid for attention or an expression of Baby Boomer myopia.

Against the academics she disdains, Paglia strives to -- and does -- write clearly. Sometimes she is no better than clear: "Coleman's vernacular is so alive it practically jumps off the page." Paglia's isn't and doesn't. There are also mistakes, though not so many as to imperil her project: Donne, who insisted that his secular poetry circulate only in manuscript, supposedly "shows a feel for the printed page." "Night's barbecue," in Jean Toomer's "Georgia Dusk," is a real Georgia pit roast, not (or not literally) a cannibal feast. Yeats's "The Second Coming" is missing its stanza break. And why not give dates of composition or publication (as a more traditional anthology would)?

Paglia's volume will not satisfy readers already familiar with the dead famous poets whose poems take up most of it. But such readers are not her intended audience. Break, Blow, Burn will be the first book about poetry that many Americans, of several generations, ever read. They could do a lot worse.

[Kenan Hamarsheh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Paglia offers a unique perspective when it comes to analyzing poems. She chose a bonafide selection of poems, and analyzed each and everyone one. Her analysis is constantly top notch, and she rarely misses a thought. Her explanation is always clear and concise. My only problem with Paglia’s writing is her constant connections to sex. While I understand that Paglia’s appeal (and her shtick) is about sex, some poems really have nothing to do with sex. In some poems, such as Leda and The Swan by Yeats, sex is the focal point of the poem. In such cases, it is appropriate to discuss sex and its effect on one’s understanding of the poem. On the other hand, some brilliant poems, which have nothing to do with sex, should not be connected to sex, just for the sake of the book’s theme. Composed Upon Westminster Bridger, by William Wordsworth, for example has nothing to do with sex. It is a brilliant poem about the state of society because of the Industrial Revolution. It was never hinted that sex plays any part in this poem, yet Paglia tore it to shreds and somehow connected it to sex. While it is brilliant how she connects so many things to sex, it is not needed in many cases. If Paglia really wanted to keep the theme of the book constant, she should’ve chosen a collection of poems that slightly hint at sex, but not explicitly. She would’ve been to showcase her brilliant skill of connecting poems to sex, while keeping the theme of the book coherent. In my opinion, even though her analysis is brilliant, she loses some credibility because of all the sex talk. All in all, this is not a bad book. It offers great explanations and a unique type of analysis.

[Ted Burke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd said some rude things about Camille Paglia's reemergence as a regular columnist at Salon.com, berating her for basically wasting the opportunity to be smart about cultural and political issues by lavishing each form of self flattery. To court cliche, even Norman Mailer has more modesty. I haven't changed my mind, but I should mention her 2005 collection of poetry criticism, Break,Blow,Burn. It's the liveliest collection of critical remarks I've in years.Camile Paglia published her collection of poetry essays Break ,Blow, Burn (now in paperback) in 2005, and straight away there were those neoconservatives who seized upon the firebrand professor as one of their own , someone bring "reason" back to the classroom. It was hoped in some discussion groups I've recently emerged from that Paglia is Sanity itself, ready to unfasten the choke hold of incomprehension that's been around literary criticism for decades.The short version of all that conversation was that Paglia would be the celebrity academic intellectual who would sift through the Great Books and present a straying society the Values and Virtues William Bennett cherishes almost as much as he does a solid poker hand and a stall stack of chips.Hold the phone. I don't think Paglia represents "a voice of reason", since the word "reason" is the last thing you want to apply to a close reading of a poet's work. It implies, by default, rationality, and it's never been the poet's assignment to reason through experience as if he or she were a scientist trying to classify and categorize the world about them.

Rather, poets, good poets, and their work continue to attract us because the way in which they usurp the instructed ordering aspects of language and instead find ways to integrated what is seemingly inexpressible, felt experience, the "interiority" of being, with what is observed in the factual being. It's perilously hard poetry to write successfully and, even when it's done well, reviewers toward totalizing , sense-making totems that bring a reasonable and agreeable sheen of coherence to a work; the way we've come to discuss poems falls too often in the smelly troughs of conventional wisdom, received perceptions, cracker-barrel philosophy, simplistic and simple minded platitudes, all of which are devised, by consensus or conspiracy on the part of readers and reviewers, to have the world remain entirely comprehensible and sane.

The voice of reason is the enemy to good poetry, and that is what Camille Paglia knows better than any other commentator; a poet, she argues in Break , Blow Burn (now in paperback) is that a poet , though a conscious and determining artist, acts none the less as a conduit for the wild strands of personal narrative, religion, myth, comprehensible realism, rage, philosophy merge, blend, twine and twist in the same discussion. Poetry is the language of unreason, another way of taking the pulse of the culture as seen from the particular and individual poet's voice who lives within and yet is compelled to view it askew. The essays in Break Blow Burn argue that the poems under review are not required to "make sense", to deliver a singular meaning, easily digested and disposed of, but exist instead to provide a subtler, more nuanced , more complex sense of what experience entails. Many ideas from many sources come to bear on a poem's thesis, and Paglia pulls them out, addresses them, and demonstrates the fascinating dialectic of the way ideas, images, expressions and varied dictions influence one another, offer shades of inference, change meanings.


It wasn't enough that the national discussion on poetry was already pathetic and contrived, a contest between assorted second and third generation splinter groups of specialized enclaves trying to inhale what was left of the air in the tiny room where the debate raged. Amazingly, the conversation had become as dumb as it was insulated. In the 2001, the New Agers and refugees from shoe gazing concerts got into the act with the publication of Roger Housden's slim collection Ten Poems to Change Your Life, in which he presented the undefined general reader with a set of poems, varied to gender, nationality, religion, life style orientation, that they might consider between errands and cell phone chats: " The Journey" by Mary Oliver ,"Last Night as I Was Sleeping," by Antonio Machado, "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman ,"Zero Circle" by Rumi ,"The Time Before Death" by Kabir,"Ode to My Socks" by Pablo Neruda , "Last Gods" by Galway Kinnell, "For the Anniversary of My Death" by W. S. Merwin, "Love After Love" by Derek Walcott "The Dark Night" by St. John of the Cross .

A high quality selection, give or take exceptions according to tastes, but Housden's intent seemed less to introduce readers to the wonders and varieties of perspective poetry might offer than to bring us to the lectern where he would deliver his Message of the Day.

Following each poem there was a light discussion of the life's circumstances the preceding poet wrote about and Housden would extrapolate through a number of nimbly massaged points of literature, theology, popular spirituality, in order to give the imagine reader a broader perspective, a moment's respite from that crackle and insistence of contemporary consumption. The aim of the collection, hardly surprising, was to have the stressed audience abandon their cell phones, lap tops, and exercise equipment and make time to smell the roses before they were gone , trampled under the heel of progress.

It's not an original premise, but it remains sage advice all the same, and one could for the moment put their disdain for the use of a poet's work as fodder for a feel-good mill, although containing the contempt was harder than it would seem. The irony was that the fresh perspectives, the original language use, the carefully crafted evidence of subtle intelligence interrogating the problematic nature of existence was being used as another means of delivering readers to insights they already know. One hoped, even prayed, one hid under sheets of wishful thinking; any way of bringing readers to quality poets was worth a little bit of pimping by an enterprising editor and motivational guru. Or was it?

The problem remained that the skewed thinking that characterizes much of the best work would only confuse and further complicated the world for an audience that wanted assurances, not ironies from what they read and reflected upon. The mind was already a roiling with contradiction and discontent. Housden's editorial genius was his ability to ignore problematic subject matter and stir his declarations skyward, looking over the hill for the displaced Gods who formerly assured us a coherent world.

Ten Poems to Change Your Life turned into a series of five similarly named collections, a choice gathering of poets per volume followed by Houston's compulsively upbeat chats. A gimmick has been established for Housden and was performing handsomely—the books, pocket sized, were perfect for bookstore cash register stands as impulse purchases, and in the dozens.

One despaired seeing that Housden's books sold while the poetry section remained the slowest selling in the store where one worked; the audience was ready to read one poem by Walt Whitman and absorb a slight ration of cracker barrel spiritualism as an afterward, but such readers weren't inclined to pick up "Leaves of Grass" and do their own thinking. Housden's audience is one that wants to be told what things mean. Housden's brilliance isn't what he says about the poems but rather in recognizing an area of mild interest to big audiences that hadn't been adequately exploited and denuded of any possibility of inspiring even a minor itch.

It was enough to make one want to give up the game entirely and watch DVD reissues instead, but there is a blast of fresh air coming through the room, Camille Paglia's Break , Blow, Burn, a collection of forty- three poems brought together for a close reading by the author.Paglia is a humanities professor at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and made her entrance on the national stage with the publication of her bulging, bombastic and usually brilliant book Sexual Personae, a sprawling study of sexual identity, its profound effect on art and culture, and the endless way that it's been disguised and altered. Personae was maddening in all its phases and investigations, with theories and declarations worthy of full dissertations popping up every few pages, yet no matter how one read her breathless , in-your-face explications that every proverbial pore of existence, society and culture was dripped with sexuality (repressed or blatant), you couldn't dismiss with the usual brush off lines.

Paglia's basic thesis about the best way to appreciate poems is to stop worshiping reputations and the sordid prestige that comes and begin instead to read and think about particular poems. Hers isn't a sensibility to bow to fashion or some one's deeply intoned name; fame and a gimmick will not acquaint the poet under review any slack. As she says in the preface, what she believes in are great poems, of themselves, separate from larger bodies of work. What we get in the forty-one essays in Break, Blow, Burn are her intense, close readings of what she regards as the best poems in English; the selection and the arrangement of what these "best" poems come to be won't satisfy every taste or notion of what honestly comprises the best work, but Paglia didn't write these missives in order to cosign every lazy idea we've had about poets and their work.

These are her favorites, using her criteria, and quite unlike many skimpy or corpulent collections slapped between covers to satisfy a fleeting fashion, she will lay her arguments in solid, comprehensible and far-flung terms, returning again, again and yet again to the respective poems she's reviewing. Less a medium to make us feel warm and secure, her poems have to do with an extreme engagement with life on life's terms. Whether finding whole worlds of secular metaphysics contained in the few lines of Wallace Stevens' "Anecdote of a Jar," sweetly limning the edgy and cavalierly erotic voyeurism of Paul Blackburn's "The Once Over" or marveling at the triple tiered city speak of Frank O'Hara's fantasy "A Mexican Guitar," Paglia discusses each of the poet's work as points in which spiritual certainty and intellectual pragmatism come into conflict, war with one another, and emerge by poem's conclusion with some third perception larger than the opposing inclinations which reveal a finer, more complex, less fixed situation for the human condition. In each case, Paglia follows the poet in the process of bringing together the poem, their process of perception, beginning with what was observed, the associations the image conjures or suggests, and delicately observing how the poet controls their associations, no less careful than a great composer, giving play to the various senses and associations each phrase and delicious reference appeals to.

Paglia's genius , if that's it to be called, is her ability to recreate the poet's thinking at the moment of composition. This makes her discussions intimate, vital, a whirlwind of excited speculation.

Flux, change, destruction, growth, all the things that make the up the endlessly repeated cycles of death and birth, are what connect these poems, and Paglia , in these vividly studied pieces, isn't about to let any of us slide by with only a nodding acquaintance with what a poem can mean as well as be. Her view of art is that it increases our awareness of life's enormity, not reduces it to some meager paragraphs of ego massage, and it's a good thing that she was willing to put her notoriety on the line in introducing some rigor into the general chat. Finally, what is especially inspiring in Paglia's fierce arguments is her refusal to grant the readers slack. None of this material is over your head, she seems to insist, Get on the ladder and see what's out there.

[Leisha Wharfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a Poetry 101 book written by Camille Paglia, so that makes it worth reading.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first hurdle in reading Camille Paglia's book "Break Blow Burn" is in parsing the subtitle "Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems. "On looking at the table of contents, one will see that it is the English-speaking world which is represented in the book. These are poems originally written in English, so evidently "the World's Best Poems" include no translations, simply because, as Paglia explains in her introduction, "translation is so problematic." Ok, fine, but then the subtitle should reflect that, don't you think? It’s not that the subtitle is not logically accurate (after all, forty-three of the best does not preclude others of the best being non-English or English translations), but, as Paglia states in her introduction, her book is meant for the general reader. Granted, the reader will be introduced to the concept of the close reading of poems, but must they need to begin with a close reading of the subtitle?

I’m allowing myself to bust Paglia’s chops, although I enjoyed this book very much. In fact, it helped to reaffirm the importance of the short lyric for me at a time when I was depressed about the likelihood that most short lyrics are nothing more than the “Mc Poems”that Donald Hall so contemptuously dubbed them. And it seems Paglia would agree with that assessment. She expresses her shock at how weak individual poems have become over the past forty years. She claims they have lost ambition, and they either dribble away their suggestiveness or rephrase and hammer it into obviousness. She touches on the crux of my personal dilemma by contrasting the poems created for the stage vs. those written for the page. In our literate world, it is on the page where Paglia thinks the poem is destined to survive or die as a visual construct. Curiously, for having come down on the side of a poem’s visual worth, there are no concrete poems included among the anointed forty-three. Perhaps this is explained by her statement later in the introduction: “For me poetry is speech-based and is not just an arbitrary pattern of signs that can be slid around like a jigsaw puzzle.”

So what were the criteria used for choosing the “best”? There seems to have been two. The first half of the book contains what Paglia calls canonical writings which have been most successful for her in her classroom. The modern half of the book contains poems which she felt she could enthusiastically recommend to the general reader: poems which would reward close scrutiny and bear as many as half a dozen re-readings in a row. For both halves it seems she has chosen poems which she feels appeal to both the ear and the eye: poems written by those who are more than “mouthers of slippery discourse.”

Her canonical choices seem relatively safe: Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge. Perhaps her omissions are more debatable. After Coleridge the choices become more American: Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Williams, Toomer, Hughes, Roethke, Lowell, Plath, and others (with two by Yeats being a significant exception.)

As Tony Shalhoub’s character Monk would say: “Now here’s the thing.” Although I enjoyed the experience of reading the book, I don’t remember one thing from it. There was not one observation that was impressive enough to stick in my memory. The main thing the book provided me was the impression that, if someone as smart as Paglia would spend over 200 pages analyzing lyric poetry, then perhaps writing lyric poetry is not so trivial a thing after all. So, I suspect the book succeeds as an interesting introduction for the general reader. For those who are already steeped in poetry, I suspect it will be an enjoyable, and perhaps forgettable, reading experience.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was as hard to slog through as Raber’s The Problem of Information. At least with that book I knew that there was a point. Oh. That sounds wrong. I don’t mean a point in a rational sense. Not sure how to say it.

I read a great review of this book a couple years back and knowing I needed to broaden my extremely limited exposure to poetry I added it to my wishlist. My daughter gave it to me as a present and I finally got to reading it earlier this year.

I think I would have enjoyed it much better if I had just read the poems and ignored all of Paglia’s commentary. Sometimes she had something enlightening to say but often as not she was also condescending to the reader. My main issue with her commentary is that she has serious issues with sex and God. I was amazed yesterday when a poem finally cropped up in which she had nothing to say about God, sex, or even God and sex. I could be wrong but I believe it to be the only one out of 43 to have the honor of not being defiled by often forced references to either. That poem is May Swenson’s ‘At East River.”

Am I now more attuned to poetry than I was before reading this book? Unfortunately, I don’t think so. I am willing to try again, though. As long as Paglia isn’t involved!

from here: http://marklindner.info/blog/2007/12/...

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

I rather liked the first section where paglia writes about older "classic" poetry and thought she had some fantastic insights.

By midway through the modern poems, though, I was ready to throw in the towel. As several other reviewers here have said, she tends to project some of her own personal issues into every poem and she comes across as saying that her reading is the only way these poems can be read.

I am certainly not a prude and I've taken enough gender studies and lit classes to know that sex is hidden in a lot of art, but Camille... Sometimes a cigar really is a cigar.

Some of the instances where she finds sexuality and violence just seem absolutely bizarre to me. I don't see it at all. And by the end of the book, it had turned from odd to distracting, from distracting to plain annoying.

The book received one extra star for including a poem by my uncle (Norman Russell).

While I was looking forward to reading this, I was vastly disappointed.

[paige · Rating 4 out of 5]

the book is divided in half; the first part serving to review poems she finds particuarly useful and most often discussed in her classes. the second part of the criticisms focuses on more modern favorites (Plath, Roethke, Williams, Toomer). regardless, her way of approaching almost all of the 43 discussed poems comes off as a lecture and are about two to three pages- background, word by word interpretation, et cetera. i loved it, but sometimes became almost elementary in its approach. either way, i still loved it overall. her obvious dedication and fascination to poetry makes it worth it.

[Blythe]

I'm loving this so far. I checked it out from the library because her crit of "Daddy" was intriguing. I agree with a reviewer on this site who complained about Paglia's choice of mostly dead white male poets, but it doesn't bother me much. The criticisms she offers are insightful and I'm learning a lot just by looking at how she reads a poem. She makes really great connections and teases out meanings I never would have done.

[Tammy Marie Jacintho · Rating 5 out of 5]

What she says makes sense! So, you can't discredit her. Paglia has a wild personality and an amazing memory. This was a great read. I especially enjoyed her analysis of Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams.

She has great skill as a writer. Not one sentence lies flat on the page. Oftentimes, she seems like she wants to get the reader riled up... But I applaud her... too many writers are complacent and aren't up for a fight. She's landing punches on every page of her analysis.

[J. Alfred · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paglia's poem choices get kind of strange (the book boldly ends with a Joni Mitchell song) and her habit of reading the poet's biography into the poems is not the kind of criticism I appreciate, but even so, this is a strong volume of great poems and great close readings of those poems. It helped me appreciate a few of the poems I already loved in new ways, and really, that's all we can ask from criticism.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent.

[Corey Wozniak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry criticism should not be so sexy, or so fun to read.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Camille puts her very Camille critique to poems mostly from the canon + a few wildcards. (I felt a literal thrill realizing the last one in the anthology is "Woodstock" by Joni Mitchell) Her writing is extremely engaging and without pretension so anyone can read it. However, for a 101 on the Paglian lens the first chapter of Sexual Personae will provide. But though she might not define everything here, her analysis uses the same themes of aesthetics, history, daimon possession, sex and the chthonic, Apollonian vs Dionysian dichotomy, form and shape, male vs female and androgyny. The preface alone is great philosophy of reading and writing poetry and full of so many great lines

- “Custodianship, not deconstruction, should be the mission & goal of the humanities”
- “Artists are makers, not just mouthers of slippery discourse”
- “Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing”
- (based opinion check) English is the best language with its "hybrid etymology, blunt Anglo-Saxon concretions, sleek Norman French urbanity, & polysyllabic Greco-Roman abstraction . . . a dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices"
- "Commercial popular culture as the authentic native voice of America . . . the M&M peanut's jingle was a vivacious poem and the creative team who produced that ad were folk artists, anonymous as the artisans of medieval cathedrals"

[Katy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book- I thoroughly enjoy a close reading of a poem, and Camille Paglia is undeniably brilliant. However, Break Blow Burns is a prime example of how ‘best’ is subjective. While it proclaims to examine 43 of the world’s best poems, I must protest that the selection is not representative of *my* 43 best, or anywhere near it. A few selections I resoundingly agreed with but I was distracted by what was notably left out and disappointed to see some poets more heavily represented while others were entirely neglected. 3.5 stars of 5.

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Camille Paglia is your college roommate. She’s intelligent and obsessed with sex. The things she says are sometimes inaccurate but never boring. Above all, she’s passionate about poetry, and she’s going to spend the night talking through some poems with you, line by line.

I loved this mix of new interpretations of much-read poems (Shakespeare’s sonnets, “The World is Too Much with Us”, “Ozymandias”, etc.) and contemporary poets that are not widely known (Rochelle Kraut, Ralph Pomeroy). It made me want to read more poetry and for that I give it four stars.

[Jose Ovalle · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF for rn bc I just don’t wanna make the effort for a book like this at the moment. There’s some really good stuff in here, especially for the non Christian poems. When it comes to the Christian poems, there’s some good analyses. Kinda like when one reads Alter, it’s interesting reading spiritual insights from an atheist. However, there is an oversexualization to some Christian poems in a way that’s so off it’s funny

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great introduction to the world of poetry. The collection is well curated, and her essays insightful.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books available to understand poems and how they work. Astute, concise, and informed. Paglia is, as her mentor Harold Bloom said, a superb reader.

[Patrick Kennedy · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5. Lots of reaching here (“misreading,” her mentor Harold Bloom might have said, more generously), but enjoyable nonetheless.

[Jean Bowen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy the no nonsense tone and format. Paglia gets right to it