“Break, Blow, Burn”

Camille Paglia reads forty three of the world’s best poems

Many of you are probably like me in that you are always on the lookout for good poetry.  Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate a few poets such as Shakespeare, Samuel Coleridge, Alexander Pope, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, and Phillip Larkin.  Yet I don’t have the time or patience to appreciate much poetry.

“A poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.”

Randall Jarrell

Even with the best poets, only a few of their poems will withstand the test of time.  Sometimes you have to wade through hundreds of pages of poems to find that one poem that strikes a powerful chord of recognition.    But when you do find that one poem, you have something eternal that will probably improve the quality of your life.

“Break, Blow, Burn” by Camille Paglia is far and away the best poetry anthology I have ever read.    So many anthologies present their poets and poems like stone tablets handed down from Mount Olympus (Sinai?), but in this book, Paglia does a line-by-line analysis of each poem she reads.  She has insights that get to the root of each of these poems.  She reads poets from John Donne, to Percy Blythe Shelly to Theodore Roethke to Sylvia Plath to, yes, Joni Mitchell.  By her close reading and profound insights into each of these poems, the reader comes to appreciate every one of these forty three poems.

As some of you may know, Camille Paglia is a controversial and irreverent literary critic, and she brings these qualities to her poetry analysis.  But what is most striking about this book is her close analysis and the depth of her insights into each of these poems.  She obviously loves each of these poems.  Her intense understanding of each of these poems causes you the reader to appreciate them too.

I discovered this book about three years ago, and now it is one of those books that I keep close at hand and treasure.

“I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can’t read any poetry.”

– Randall Jarrell

I’m sure this book is being used in hundreds of college classrooms by enlightened English and literature instructors.  “Break, Blow, Burn” would be a perfect gift for any young person who you think is aware enough to appreciate poetry. It is really for anyone who wants to increase the number of poems they appreciate.