Secrets of Vertical Art. Oxford Lectures on Poetry by Simon Armitage

Abstract

A Vertical Art. On Poetry is a collection of essays in literary criticism by Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate of Great Britain, who based them on a series of his lectures delivered as Oxford Professor of Poetry. The framework of the book is a practice-oriented theory of poetry as a “vertical art” applied to reading a wide range of British and American authors mostly from the mid-20th century up to the present day, but reaching from time to time into the literary past. “Verticality” is a quality of poetic form that is actively engaging reader’s imagination and perception. It implies a demand for inner organization resisting the formlessness of a white page and self-restraining while choosing its own means. The result is a rhythmic pattern, both aural and visual, much unlike the “horizontalness” of extensively growing prose. The rhythmic pattern here is a broad definition covering an interplay between the lucid and the indirect, the sound and the silence, the sign and the gap on various levels. Discussing poetry in the book also involves literary institutions, in particular the contemporary Americanised model of interaction between the poet and the academia through creative writing courses. Apart from the canonical figures of American Renaissance (W. Whitman, E. Dickinson), Armitage’s perspective on American poetry includes E. Bishop, R. Lowell, A.R. Ammons, W.H. Auden, Thom Gunn, Bob Dylan, J. Wright, F. Wright, M. Donaghy, K. Young.

Keywords

• simon armitage
• oxford university
• british and american poetry
• poetic form
• e. bishop; bob dylan; thom gunn
• review