How to Think Like a Poet: The Poets That Made Our World and Why We Need Them by

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An entertaining guide to history's most influential and inspiring poets - from Homer and Sappho to Shakespeare and Frank O'Hara.

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How did the greatest poets in history make the world anew? And what can we learn from the magic, the wisdom and the humour that is the gift of the greatest poets of our human civilization? From the genius of the Greeks and Romans to love and metaphysics of the Middle Ages, to the concrete wonder of New York and the Beat Poets of San Francisco, this is the ultimate guide to the greatest writers of the human age, and what their extraordinary lives can teach us about how to see the world.More than any other genre, poetry represents the art of thinking. Writing about the 17th-century English poet John Donne, T.S. Eliot summed up how vital thinking is to the whole poetic enterprise. 'A thought to Donne was an experience,' he wrote; 'it modified his sensibility.' Where most people experience a thought and quickly move on to the next, for the poet a thought is something that needs to be savoured, articulated and preserved. It's an emotional experience, not just an intellectual one – a sensation that builds up in the mind and body and has to be committed to the page.In showing how the great poets of human history lived and worked — and illuminating the gifts of the written word they left us — the poet and poetry teacher Dai George provides a readable and entertaining introduction to how to think like a poet, and how we can weave that thinking into our everyday lives. He addresses questions the great poets have grappled with: What is it to describe the world? How can we express love, grief, or friendship? And how can we rise above the misery of the world and see the beauty in the everyday?This book paints vivid portraits of a global assortment of great poets throughout history: from Sappho, Juvenal and LiXu, to William Shakespeare and John Donne, to Frank O Hara, Pablo Neruda and Sylvia Plath. George also seeks to re-examine the canon – which has been overwhelmingly Western, white and male – who have long been held up as pillars of the art, and bring to light major figures from other, no less important cultures and communities – including major poets from China, pre-colonial America and Japan. He also engages with the extraordinary boom in poetry on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok – all signs of what every poet knows – we need poetry in order to live better, more fulfilling lives.In each brief chapter, George brings to life these often prescient, always compelling poetical thinkers, showing how their way of writing about and understanding the world grew out of their own lives and times and how we can use their insights today.

Author Biography

Dai George is a poet, novelist, critic and academic based in London. His first poetry collection, The Claims Office, was an Evening Standard book of the year and his second, titled Karaoke King, was published by Seren in June 2021. His first novel, The Counterplot, was published as an Audible Original in 2019, and he is currently working on his second. He is the former reviews editor of Poetry London and has taught poetry and creative writing for many years in his role as lecturer at Swansea University and at UCL.His poetry has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including Poetry Review, Poetry Wales and Islands Are But Mountains: New Poetry from the United Kingdom. His criticism and non-fiction features in popular and academic forums including the Guardian, The White Review, and Cambridge Quarterly.Alongside Sarah Howe and Vidyan Ravinthiran, George was a founding editor of the online poetry journal Prac Crit, which drew a large global readership across its five-year lifespan. His first novel, The Counterplot, was published as an Audible Original in 2019, and he is currently working on his second.

Table of Contents

Introduction1 How to Think Like Homer2 How to Think Like Sappho3 How to Think Like Li Bai4 How to Think Like Jalal al-Din Rumi5 How to Think Like Dante Alighieri6 How to Think Like Geoffrey Chaucer7 How to Think Like William Shakespeare8 How to Think Like John Donne9 How to Think Like John Milton10 How to Think Like Matsuo Basho11 How to Think Like William Wordsworth12 How to Think Like Walt Whitman13 How to Think Like Emily Dickinson14 How to Think Like Rabindranath Tagore15 How to Think Like T. S. Eliot16 How to Think Like Langston Hughes17 How to Think Like Pablo Neruda18 How to Think Like Elizabeth Bishop19 How to Think Like Aimé Césaire20 How to Think Like Dylan Thomas21 How to Think Like Frank O'Hara22 How to Think Like Sylvia Plath23 How to Think Like Audre Lorde24 How to Think Like a Contemporary PoetAcknowledgementsPermissionsIndex

Review

An entertaining guide to the rhyme and reason of poetry… capacious and curious. George has an admirable ability to get to the heart of things in just a few lines. Dai George distils a lifetime's poetic thinking and reading into this warm, accessible book. * The Idler *This is a wonderfully lucid and compelling account of how poetry works and why it matters. In 24 exhilarating chapters, George guides us from Homer's Iliad to the Instapoetry of today. A triumph in both concept and execution, How to Think Like a Poet fizzes almost audibly with intellectual energy and excitement. * Mark Ford, Professor of English Literature, University College London *With an infectious delight in his material, Dai George is a sure and skilful guide through some of poetry's most significant waters, opening our eyes to its everyday wonders. Thanks to its consciously global canvas, How to Think Like a Poet does something rather different to your usual poetic history or handbook, opening up fresh connections and avenues of thought across its chapters. George's agile, luminous, refreshing readings of individual poets down the centuries reveal just how much they have to offer us today. * Sarah Howe, British poet and lecturer in poetry at King's College, London *Poetry haters will fall in love with poetry and the poetry lover will walk away refreshed after reading just a few pages of this authoritative, wide-ranging and witty book that is persistently fascinating and always an easy read! * Daljit Nagra, British poet and author of Indiom *

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An entertaining guide to history's most influential and inspiring poets – from Homer to Sappho, And Shakespeare to Frank O'Hara – and how they can teach us how to understand the world around us.

Details ISBN1399408305 Author Dai George Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Series How To Think Year 2024 ISBN-13 9781399408301 Format Hardcover Imprint Bloomsbury Continuum Place of Publication London Country of Publication United Kingdom Audience General Pages 320 ISBN-10 1399408305 Publication Date 2024-08-29 Subtitle The Poets That Made Our World and Why We Need Them UK Release Date 2024-08-29 AU Release Date 2025-01-06 DEWEY 809.1 We've got this

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