Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems

by Camille Paglia

Overview

America’s most provocative intellectual brings her blazing powers of analysis to the most famous poems of the Western tradition—and unearths some previously obscure verses worthy of a place in our canon. Combining close reading with a panoramic breadth of learning, Camille Paglia sharpens our understanding of poems we thought we knew, from Shakespeare to Dickinson to Plath, and makes a case for including in the canon works by Paul Blackburn, Wanda Coleman, Chuck Wachtel, Rochelle Kraut—and even Joni Mitchell. Daring, riveting, and beautifully written, Break, Blow, Burn is a modern classic that excites even seasoned poetry lovers—and continues to create generations of new ones. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307425096
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/18/2007
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	503 KB

About the Author

Camille Paglia is University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson; Sex, Art, and American Culture; and Vamps & Tramps: New Essays. She has also written The Birds, a study of Alfred Hitchcock. She lives in Philadelphia.

Read an Excerpt

Break, Blow, Burn

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By Camille Paglia

Pantheon

Copyright © 2005 Camille Paglia
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-375-42084-3

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Chapter One

Holy Sonnet XIV by John Donne

Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you As yet but knock, breath, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new. I, like an usurp'd town, to another due, Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end, Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue, Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain, But am betroth'd unto your enemy; Divorce me, untie, or break the knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

"For deliverance from life's thronging temptations, however, Donne needs radical, even violent aid: "bend/Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new" (3-4). The soul-vessel must be hacked to pieces and melted down over high heat to purge its impurities. The aggressive alliteration-a barrage of explosive b sounds-makes us feel the trauma of destruction before rebirth. There are sexual innuendos in "make me new" and also in "That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me," a paradox conflating erection with resurrection (3). Spiritual victory strangely requires defeat by God, since man is too weak to achieve redemption on his own. A higher self must be forged from the wreckage of his old identity." -p.32

(Continues...)

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All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

	Introduction	vii
1	Sonnet 73	3
2	Sonnet 29	8
3	The Ghost's Speech	12
4	"The Flea"	20
5	Holy Sonnet I	26
6	Holy Sonnet XIV	30
7	"Church-monuments"	34
8	"The Quip"	38
9	"Love"	43
10	"To His Coy Mistress"	47
11	"The Chimney Sweeper"	53
12	"London"	58
13	"The World Is Too Much with Us"	63
14	"Composed upon Westminster Bridge"	67
15	"Ozymandias"	71
16	"Kubla Khan"	76
17	Song of Myself	85
18	"Because I Could Not Stop for Death"	95
19	"Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers"	101
20	"The Soul Selects Her Own Society"	106
21	"The Second Coming"	109
22	"Leda and the Swan"	114
23	"Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock"	119
24	"Anecdote of the Jar"	123
25	"The Red Wheelbarrow"	127
26	"This Is Just to Say"	131
27	"Georgia Dusk"	134
28	"Jazzonia"	140
29	"Cuttings"	145
30	"Root Cellar"	149
31	"The Visitant"	153
32	"Man and Wife"	158
33	"Daddy"	164
34	"A Mexican Guitar"	177
35	"The Once-Over"	185
36	"At East River"	192
37	"Old Pond"	197
38	"The Tornado"	201
39	"A Paragraph Made Up of Seven Sentences"	205
40	"My Makeup"	210
41	"Wanda Why Aren't You Dead"	214
42	"Corner"	219
43	"Woodstock"	225
	Biographical Notes	233
	Bibliography	241
	Acknowledgments	243
	Permissions	245

Editorial Reviews

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) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

From the controversial Paglia; with an eight-city author tour. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Cultural guru (Vamps and Tramps, 1994, etc.) and academic prophet (Humanities and Media Studies/Univ. of the Arts) Paglia offers a series of close, brief, and beautifully lucid readings of 43 poems, all written in English and most squarely within the canon. Employing old-fashioned "explication of text" (a close line-by-line reading), the author aims to loosen these poems' "primal energies"-which are subversive, sublime, re-creative, and accessible for all readers, she asserts. Paglia rejects the "spirit-killing" jargon of Post-Structuralism, which she blames for the demise of college literature departments, and returns here to her early New Criticism training by Milton Kessler and Harold Bloom. She makes respectable selections from early English poetry: two Shakespearean sonnets, "The Flea" and several exquisite Holy Sonnets by Donne, and Marvel's "To His Coy Mistress" are all obvious choices, though three from George Herbert seems a bit excessive. Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge get one or two selections each to represent the Romantics. Paglia treats Whitman's Song of Myself (parts 1 and 24) and three chilling poems by Dickinson in more welcome detail, reflecting her personal academic interests. Perhaps her most arresting choices are three Roethke poems, which pay gruesome attention to natural particulars. Jean Toomer's "Georgia Dusk," May Swenson's "At East River," Gary Snyder's "Old Pond," and Norman H. Russell's "The Tornado" also display a strong sense of place within nature. Snyder aside, the Beats get short shrift, and Paglia receives minimum points for including multicultural writers and women, although Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" appears with an extended explication, and LApoet Wanda Coleman's tormented, feminist "Wanda Why Aren't You Dead" also makes the cut. But the fun of such a collection is disputing who gets in, who gets left out. Robert Lowell's superbly sad "Man and Wife" stands in a class by itself, as do the lyrics of Joni Mitchell's troubadour-fused "Woodstock," which conclude the collection and reinforce Paglia's zeal for mass media-lest the reader forget. An indisputably terrific primer for all students of literature in English.

Kirkus Reviews

She flies as high as you can go. . . . Bold and convincing. . . . Exemplary. . . . A rich book.”

–The New York Times Book Review

 

“The chapter on Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ will take the top of your head off!” –James Wolcott

 

“As entertaining as it is dazzingly erudite, Break, Blow, Burn is capable of re-energizing any reader’s engagement with poetry.”

–Francine du Plessix Gray, The Week

 

“I hope a lot of people read this book. . . . There wasn’t a commentary where I didn’t learn something about the poem in question, no matter how familiar the poem was.” –Philip Marchand, Toronto Star

 

“It will have students storming the walls of tomorrow’s English departments, mad for poetry again.” –St. Petersburg Times

 

“Dazzling. . . . Bursts with her ingenuity. . . . Brilliant insights . . . permeate the book. . . . Readers receive a marvelous education.”

–Rocky Mountain News

 

“Paglia’s vision is always fresh. . . . She makes a fascinating and challenging reading companion. These essays will inspire anyone to turn back to poetry again.” –The Times (London)

From the Publisher