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The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner, Ben Lerner is a work of literary fiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Hatred of Poetry about?

Novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its continued relevance. Poetry. Perhaps Marianne Moore said it best: "I, too, dislike it." What other art takes its marginality as a given, and is so widely bemoaned even by its practitioners? Ben Lerner writes, "Many more people agree they hate poetry than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore." In this inventive and plain-spoken essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defence of the art. He examines both poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato, who famously claimed that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and its greatest practitioners, providing inspired close-readings of Keats, Dickinson, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless, communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry , Lerner has crafted

Who reads The Hatred of Poetry?

Author

Ben Lerner, Ben Lerner

Publisher

McClelland and Stewart

Published

2016

Language

EN

ISBN

9780771048258

Category

work of literary fiction

Subjects

Fiction, Poetry, Philosophy

Rating

3.84 / 5 (28 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14