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Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems
by Camille Paglia
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Pantheon (2005-03-29)
ISBN: 0375420843
EAN: 9780375420849
Dewy Decimal #: 821.009
Hardcover: 272 pages
Release Date: 2005-03-29
SKU: 070405145
Condition: Collectible: Good
Comments: First edition in good condition. No highlights/markings/bumped edges/creases. However there is a slight water stain on front page and outer edge. Dust jacket in good condition no tears. Poem lovers will enjoy this book. nice clean read. worth having in your collection for a great price. (ref A 66)
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World’s Best Poems is destined to become a landmark. In it, America’s premier intellectual provocateur explores and celebrates a series of great poems of the Western tradition, including some surprising discoveries of her own. She brings new energy and insight to our understanding of poems we already know, such as masterpieces by Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley, Dickinson, Lowell, and Plath. She leads us to appreciate the artistry of writers with whom we may not be familiar, such as Chuck Wachtel and Wanda Coleman. And she hails the songwriter Joni Mitchell as a major contemporary poet.
Daring, erudite, entertaining, and infused throughout with Paglia’s inimitable style and passion, this beautifully written book––and the dazzling mind behind it––will entice readers to begin or renew a passionate engagement with poetry.
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Customer Reviews
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Great for Everyone
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-06-16
This book is great for students, teachers, and "general readers." The introduction alone is worth the cover price, but you might not want to listen to me. I strongly oppose jargon-filled "literary theory" and instead celebrate logical (and sometimes emotional) close reading. Therefore, the introduction something I'd be proud to write.
Paglia's readings of the poems are just right: clear, concise, and not overdone. The poems she selected are, for the most part, logical choices, although I don't think Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock" is on the same level with "To His Coy Mistress." However, some of her more unusual choices are great, such as Blackburn's "The Once-Over," which is a severely underappreciated work by a too-little-known poet.
Overall, this is a great book to keep on the shelf for inspiration.
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Excellent Primer
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-06-15
I have owned this book for a year and find that it equally instructive today as the first. Prof. Paglia provides a solid method for reading and thinking about poetry and other literary forms. Her ability to breakdown each poem and link it to other work made each "chapter" exciting.
Her final review, Joni Mitchell's Woodstock, was particularly insightful. Comparing Ms. Mitchell's performance to Crosby, Stoills, Nash and Young was particularly insightful.
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Explicating Shakespeare and Snyder - A critic takes on William and Gary, more
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-08-31
Camille Paglia, professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, made a name for herself in the larger culture with "Sexual Personae" and a series of books that examined, to use the title of another, "Sex, Art, and American Culture."
Always the provocateur, Paglia is saddened by "poetry's declining status" which "has made its embattled practitioners insular and self-protective." Desiring to reach a wider audience, she has produced a volume of explications of individual poems in English that is humbling in its bravura performance and depressing in its worldview.
"Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems" ($12.95 in paperback from Vintage) takes its title from one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets (and one of the 43): "That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend / Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new."
Paglia writes that "Donne is appealing to God to overwhelm him and compel his redemption from sin. My secular but semimystical view of art is that it taps primal energies, breaks down barriers, and imperiously remakes our settled way of seeing. Animated by the breath force (the original meaning of 'spirit' and 'inspiration'), poetry brings exhilarating spiritual renewal."
But Paglia's worldview belies the wonder-working power of poetry. In Shakespeare's "Sonnet 73," the first work she considers, the bard reminds us "to love that well which thou must leave ere long."
"Whatever we seek or crave," Paglia writes, "a person, a profession, a high ideal -- is evanescent. Nothing survives the ash pit of the grave. & Our sense of life's transience intensifies its pleasures."
At the end of the book, Paglia finds Joni Mitchell's performance of "Woodstock" "a harrowing lament for hopes dashed and energies tragically wasted."
In between, she calls Yeats' "Leda and the Swan" ("Before the indifferent beak could let her drop") the greatest poem of the 20th century. She notices that in Gary Snyder's "Old Pond" "a busy nuthatch & is & the modest, flutelike substitute for the authoritarian boom of the Judeo-Christian God" and all that is available to us is to subordinate our little selves to nature, "the here-and-now salvation of (Snyder's) 'naked bug.'"
The more contemporary poems Paglia picks are fairly thin gruel (such as Rochelle Kraut's "My Makeup," just one short sentence). Paglia finds sex everywhere, and she may well be confusing its drive with the more modest work of poetry, which only begets words.
Yet Paglia's line-by-line readings draw us in. This is a book to learn from, after all.
Copyright 2007 Chico Enterprise-Record. Used by permission.
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It Breaks Blows and Burns
Rating (4)
Date: 2007-08-17
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Paglia's book of commentary on poems gives close sensitive readings of classics. Each 3-4 page essay, an easy read when I have just a few minutes, deepens my understanding of feelings expressed through art. Familiar poems burn brighter after reading her thoughts.
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Her fresh writing, + 43 (mostly) great poems = success
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-06-10
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
This book is a real refreshment -- a shower of [mostly; I could have done without "Woodstock"] great poems, with just enough stirring, insightful commentary to draw the reader deep into the pool of each poem's meanings and pleasures. The format is very successful, with each typographically well-presented poem followed by three to five pages of thoughtful, extremely well written critique and commentary, including history, analysis, and politically fresh perspectives. Unlike other reviewers who didn't like the selection of poems, I really appreciated the mix of classic standards with modern poems I wasn't familiar with, and which seem to have been selected for their accessibility and power. (Only the final selection -- Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock" -- was out of its league.)
This was an ideal "car book," one I keep in the car and read in 15-minute episodes as I'm waiting for an appointment, or eating a meal on the road. It is a great way to bring poetry in, or back in, to your life, and to leaven a diet of more utilitarian or narrative reading.
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