A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

An acute and deeply insightful book of essays exploring poetic form and the role of instinct and imagination within form-from former poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Robert Hass.

Robert Hass-former poet laureate, winner of the National Book Award, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize-illuminates the formal impulses that underlie great poetry in this sophisticated, graceful, and accessible volume of essays drawn from a series of lectures he delivered at the renowned Iowa Writers' Workshop.

A Little Book on Form brilliantly synthesizes Hass's formidable gifts as both a poet and a critic and reflects his profound education in the art of poetry. Starting with the exploration of a single line as the basic gesture of a poem, and moving into an examination of the essential expressive gestures that exist inside forms, Hass goes beyond approaching form as a set of traditional rules that precede composition, and instead offers penetrating insight into the true openness and instinctiveness of formal creation.

A Little Book on Form is a rousing reexamination of our longest lasting mode of literature from one of our greatest living poets.