True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing

by Allen R. Grossman

True-Love is the fulfillment of revered poet-critic Allen Grossman’s long service to poetry in the interests of humanity.  Poetry’s singular mission is to bind love and truth together—love that desires the beloved’s continued life, knotted with the truth of life’s contingency—to help make us more present to each other.

In the spirit of Blake’s vow of “mental fight,” Grossman contends with challenges to the validity of the poetic imagination, from Adorno’s maxim “No poetry after Auschwitz,” to the claims of religious authority upon truth, and the ultimate challenge posed by the fact of death itself. To these challenges he responds with eloquent and rigorous arguments, drawing on wide resources of learning and his experience as master-poet and teacher. Grossman’s readings of Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Paul Celan, and others focus on poems that interrogate the real or enact the hard bargains that literary representation demands. True-Love is destined to become an essential book wherever poetry and criticism sustain one another.

Genres: Poetry

208 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Katrinka]

Upon finishing: some interesting (if thick/dense—pick the adjective of your choice) essays that get overshadowed by the overly long and often baffling "The Passion of Laocoön," which had me going straight to tropey jokes that wonder what in the world the author was smoking, and whether said drug was to be praised or lamented for enabling such feats of writerly endurance.