Thank you Netgalley for letting me read and review this book of poetry. William Logan's collection of essays pairs poems together based on theme. It goes into a historical perspective on each poem. If you love poetry and history this is a great read for you.

I received an ARC through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

It was kind of mesmerizing to read some of my favorite poems through the lens of the past.

This historical context for writers is interesting, and is an aid to understanding (for instance, that there was a sonnet craze) but it is not the kind of book that you can read straight through without a break. I skipped around in it, reading the parts that pertained to my favorites.

Logan's "Dickinson's Nerves, Frost's Woods" is an impressive feat both in terms of research and as an exercise in patience. Proposing readings of well-known poems by well-known poets that considers the historical context that surrounds these works, a kind of "reading the margins", as Logan calls them, this is a very attentive and impressively written and researched collection of essays. Being familiar with the work of the poets discussed in the book, especially the specific poems that are examined - and I mean familiar as in that you have read a significant amount of their work as well as literature and theory about it - was, in my opinion, fundamental in order to fully appreciate Logan's work. I only read the first few chapters with relative attention and engagement before I began to get off track and skim, at first every couple of pages, then flipping through whole chunks of a chapter. Having had no previous exposure to the work of Percy Shelley, Pound, Frost, or Dickinson, nor any of the other poets in the collection, really prevented me from fully appreciating Logan's writing. It also prevented me from caring so much about all the more specific biographical information he presented to the reader. Therefore my opinion of the collection is rather slanted, although I believe that a more insightful reader will not only be able to appreciate Logan's writing and research skills as I did, but will also take much more away from the content itself.

Personally, poetry is one of those genres that people either pick up the occasional poetry book or they delve in to each poem in the hopes of discovering the author's deepest meanings. This book has a good balance where the poems are well analyzed, but they're not going to scare away a dabbler of poetry. I enjoyed the side by side poems and how the essays were well written without feeling like I needed a class on Literary Criticism to understand it.

Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods

Poetry in the Shadow of the Past

by William Logan

Columbia University Press

Nonfiction (Adult) , Poetry

Pub Date 19 Jun 2018

I am reviewing a copy of Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods through Columbia University Press and Netgalley:

This book contains striking essays about the poetry of the past attempting to bring the poems back into the world which they came from. William Logan’s criticism is formed in the various times and places the selected poems were created from Regency London to Metro Lightning.

Understanding about the time each poet lives in gives us a fresh and new understanding of the poem now encrusted with commentary. The author shows that criticism can not be given by only understanding the words of the poem but also the time which the poet lived in.

I give Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods four out of five stars!

Dickinson's Nerves, Frost's Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past (Hardcover) by William Logan is the examination of several well-known poems. Logan is Alumni/ae Professor and Distinguished Teaching Scholar at the University of Florida. He is the author of The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin (2005); Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue (2009); and Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure: The Dirty Art of Poetry (2012), all from Columbia University Press, as well as eleven books of poems and other works of criticism.

Poetry is a subject I recently picked up without much background on the subject except for an undergraduate English Literature class. I enjoy classic poetry as well as review modern poetry. I will admit that sometimes poetry does not make sense, for example, Gertrude Stein's Tiny Buttons is still a mystery to me, and it took over a year before I could get a grasp on Eric Linsker's La Far.

Logan puts the poems in his essays into historical context. This is something I can appreciate as my undergraduate degree is in history. The compositions start right off with a double dose of history with Shelley's "Ozymandias." History is presented in both the Egyptian king and in Shelley's life. The poem is well dissected and compared to Horace Smith's of the same title. Logan, in his essays, examines the title poem to another of a similar time or subject. Ezra Pound's "In A Station of the Metro" is discussed. Pound is another poet that I have trouble with and the information presented is beneficial. The complexity of Pound's condensed work paired with William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow. It seems like a simple poem is rather complex when analyzed. Logan goes deep into the poem. The wheelbarrow and chickens belonged to Thaddeus Marshall and old African-American that Williams knew growing up. Logan includes census information, a map, and pictures of Marshal and his house.

Shakespeare is compared to Shakespeare. Dickinson, Lowell, Heaney, Wilbur, Longfellow, and Frost, twice are included.  The placement of an editor's comma changed the meaning of the original line "The woods are lovely, dark and deep" to "The woods are lovely, dark, and deep."  The comma creates a real change to the meaning.  Here too, the poem goes much deeper than a simple reflection on a winter's night

Logan's essays provide insight into the poems and to their context in time.  Poetry does not stand alone.  It has a history and its own roots in time and place.  I received a review copy of this book but was unable to read the text in the electronic copy.  I was taken in by the premise so much that I bought a hardback copy to review.  I was not disappointed. Very informative and enlightening.

For the uninitiated, poetry can sometimes be daunting and intimidating. Many times the reader is left in the dark regarding the references and allusions, structures and significance of the verse. In Dickinson's Nerves, Frost's Woods, William Logan provides some excellent guidance for the reader who seeks to better understand some of English Literature's most famous poems. His collection of essays juxtapose two contemporaries from various points in the evolution of poetry, with extensive information about the historical, social and cultural contexts in which they were written. Logan even presents images of original copies and includes draft versions to illustrate the process of creation and refinement. The weather and influential major events of the time are included as well. This book would be a useful guide for university-level students with a basic literature background, but would also appeal to anyone seeking to gain a clarified appreciation for this wonderful art form.

Logan's collection of essays pairs poems together based on theme and offers a historical perspective on each one. The result is a book that will find a way into my classroom shelves. I will certainly make reference to it when discussing some of the works included here with my students.

This is a collection of essays that each discuss two poems side by side. The poems are linked by a topic (such as skunks or horses) and Logan then discusses both poems from a historical perspective. The author calls his historical approach 'reading the margins', and to me this was like reading the footnotes of an anthology, except the footnotes are fully developed essays in their own right. I really enjoyed that the focus of the essays was literary history and I learned a lot about poems I've read before a thousand times, such us Shelley's Ozymandias and Frost's The Draft Horse. Even though I've had to sit through a couple of lectures about both before, I never learnt much about their historical context. Therefore Logan's analysis was refreshing and made me connect with the familiar lines in new ways.

That said, I was mostly drawn to the essays that were about poems I was already familiar with, whereas the essays that covered poems I hadn't read before didn't capture me in the same way. The author doesn't waste much time on trying to convice the reader to care about the poems before launching into the analysis. The collection also assumes that you already have some background knowledge in basic literary theory and therefore might not be very accessible if this is your first introduction to literary criticism. That's not to say that the writing is overly dense or esoteric, though. I only have a smattering of literature courses behind me and could follow Logan's analysis with ease and found it interesting.

Please be advised I will be adding the link to my full review (retroactively) upon the review's publication.

Great collection!I requested this one by accident but I ended up liking it a lot! It was captivating and interesting!

I mistakenly assumed this to be a book of poetry, as it was under the poetry category. This made for some initial confusion but, on the whole, I found this to contain a wonderfully intriguing series of discourses on the poems chosen. However, I was previously unfamiliar with much of the poetry included here and would not have picked this book up if I had realised this, beforehand. As interesting as this was, I would have benefited from a prior knowledge or adoration of the poems used here.

I could not give this a higher star rating purely through my own fault of not reading the synopsis properly and assuming this to be something it was not. Apologies for my misdemeanour.

Could not read file. Very disappointed; wish a Kindle file was available.

I was looking forward to reading this but it was so difficult as so many of the words ran together that I was unable to read it.

This book was impossible to read. Literally. Every single letter of the book ran together. Itlookedsomethingilkethisandwascompletelyimpossibletodecipher. I was interested to read it, but couldn't.

William Logan has succeeded in bringing the past to life in his poetry collection, "Dickinson's Nerves, Frost's Woods." Logan allows us to step into the lost world of the poets. He guides us through the pages of verse to experience the poems in a new light, as we are shown the life and the world of the poets. This is a fantastic collection of some of the greatest poems by some of the most memorable poets of all time. A worthy addition to your bookshelf and for any reader who loves poetry.

Was looking forward to this one but the words were all jumbled together so I could not read it.