Brooks And Warren's Understanding Poetry*

These pages are a river down which a young girl watches her lover disappear, and someone meditates upon crude rhythms of a city street and finds a suffering God. The seasons change and change again, a pear tree reaches high, a cock crows, and the chickens sit beside a red wheelbarrow. All the seasons of the soul are ripened and transmuted here, and I, the reader, disappear, as well, into the flow. ___ *UNDERSTANDING POETRY, by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, has been a premier poetry textbook in high schools and colleges, in revised editions, for 6 decades. The book is basically a luxuriously rich anthology, with commentary on poems organized into chapters to illustrate the various facets of poetics.