Poetry and Its Others
News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgments
1 A Dialogic Poetics: Poetry and the Novel, Theory, and the Law
2 Poetry and the News
3 Poetry and Prayer
4 Poetry and Song
2 Poetry and the News
3 Poetry and Prayer
4 Poetry and Song
Notes
Index
Review Quotes
Choice
“Illuminating analyses of a diverse set of poems. . . . Recommended.”
Lisa M. Steinman | Wallace Stevens Journal
"Ramazani casts much light on the question of what poetry is—or perhaps what it does. . . . [H]is approach opens new possibilities for reconsidering how poems. . . are in dialogue with philosophy or with contemporary writing about the visual arts."
Twentieth-Century Literature
“After considering the historical contexts and thematic ties between works of different genres, [Ramazani] swoops in on passages of rich complexity and allusiveness, seizing the kernel of poetic distinctiveness. . . . Against a background of nonpoetry, the specific features that make poetry recognizable suddenly stand out.”
Time Present: The Newsletter of the T. S. Eliot Society
“A wide-ranging affair that travels throughout the English-speaking world and is as engaged with the contemporary as it is with the established canon. . . . Marrying methodology and content, Poetry and Its Others becomes the rich and varied thing it sets out to consider.”
Brian M. Reed, University of Washington
“It is delightful to watch Jahan Ramazani do what he does best: delve into poets such as Hopkins, Yeats, Heaney, and Muldoon and show us the nitty-gritty of how their verse works. Anyone who loves poetry is going to come away from this book revitalized, prepared to think complexly about the modes of address that poets employ, as well as the kinds of writing that they habitually echo, distort, take apart, and reassemble.”
Bonnie Costello, Boston University
“Jahan Ramazani is that rare critic who has read and understood a wide range of contemporary theory but is also a strong close reader, bringing his arguments alive through example. Poetry and Its Others is a capstone of the work he has done so far, combining his interests in genre, hybridity, and dialogism; his remarkably wide, global knowledge of modern poetry in English; and his commitment to poetry as a distinctive lens and language by which to encounter the world. This impressive and richly suggestive book moves through so many large areas of poetic dialogue and reciprocity with other forms that it will be important to poetry lovers both in and outside academia.”
English Studies
"Like a poem, Ramazani’s book converses with us, and then quietly leaves us, so we can ponder the consequences on our own."
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