Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman have revived the 1950s' edition of this book. & it is worth reading even by philosophers for in the final analysis, from Plato to Blanchot to Jean-Luc Marion are all poets. Where does poetry end and philosophy begin!!?

Chattopadhyay, Subhasis

English

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573PB July 2019REVIEWSFor review in PRABUDDHA BHARATA,  publishers need to send two copies of their latest publications The Princeton Handbook of World PoetriesEdited by Roland Greene and Stephen CushmanPrinceton University Press, 41 Wil-liam Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540. usa. Website: https://press.princeton.edu. 2017. 720 pp. $35. pb. isbn 9780691170510.he creation of dictionaries is the need of the hour. Ronald Greene and Stephen Cushman have done the impossible by creating one of the best dictionaries in recent times. The book under review is one of its kind and has entries ranging from ‘Newar Poetry’ to the poetry of Ecuador. In recent times such a wide-ranging book has not been published within world poetries. Apart from accommodating lesser known poetries; this book is indispensable for having up-to-date bibli-ographies at the end of each entry. For instance, within the entry of the poetry of England, we have references to both offline critical texts and to functional websites (175). Terry Eagleton’s How to Read a Poem (2007) is mentioned as well as weblinks given to the Perdita Manuscripts. The beauty of this handbook is that each entry is simi-larly well annotated. The entry on Hebrew poetry is a case in point. The misconception of Hebrew poetry being homogenous is erased and the def-inition of poetry by Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Poetic Closure (1968) is germane to all poetry writ-ten everywhere: ‘As soon as we perceive that a verbal sequence has a sustained rhythm, that it is formally structured according to a continuously operating principle of organization … we are in the presence of poetry’ (249). This is found within the entry of Hebrew poetry which is not merely Biblical poetry as E Spicehandler points out.The book under review maps this ‘verbal se-quence’ found all over the world. This includes ‘digital poetry’ (584), the antecedents of which are meticulously traced in the entry on the poetry of the United States: ‘If the “little magazine” revolu-tion of the 1960s was a poetry of the page in which typography and lineation represented expressive intent, the digital revolution of the 1990s and after inaugurated new forms of digital poetry … [and] aleatory … composition … [including] Flarf ’ (ibid.).The editors and contributors rightly understand that it is no longer possible to predict what turn po-etry will take in every extant language in the world because the Internet has changed the creation and dissemination of poetry. Poetry is being read more than ever before because of the Internet and there can be no sense of an ending in our simulated world. The entries in this reprint, unlike the first print of this book in the late 1950s, are all therefore, open-ended. If the first edition of this book and the edi-tion under review are read synoptically, then one knows the labour with which this edition has been updated. A Herculean task that nonetheless is the proper task of academic littérateurs.  This book should be in literature departments and with every poetry lover. It is refreshing to find that jargon has not been used in this book. Poetry has been studied here without bombast and redundant reliance on other non-literary disciplines. To use Derek Attridge’s phrase, The Princeton Handbook of World Poetries reasserts and reinstates ‘the singularity of literature’. The translations of non-English poems within most entries are unexpected treats for the reader. This is how literature should be practised, and this Handbook is a strong rebuttal to those who are entangled with dumbed-down philosophy that goes by the name of literary theory within aca-demic literary circles.Subhasis ChattopadhyayPsychoanalystAssistant Professor of EnglishNarasinha Dutt College, HowrahT

The Princeton Handbook of World Poetries

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The Princeton Handbook of World Poetries

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