Robert Von Hallberg

I bought this book because I was looking for something about musicality in poetry. I was mostly interested in anything about that most elusive of subjects, vowel music. Unfortunately, I had to wade through a lot of loose and un-engaging material before I finally decided to skip ahead to the chapter I was actually interested in. The other stuff might have been more compelling if the author had used more actual poetry for his examples, however a lot of the pieces analyzed are neither verse nor poetic, but then that's typical of 20th/21st century literary criticism.

The chapter on musicality was actually quite good--at least 80% of it. The author writes well about Tin Pan Alley and Doo Wop lyrics, contrasting them and tying the two and their differences to the art of poetry. He then analyzes a couple of good poems, but then comes back around again to one of the previous non-poems, "Glory" by Thylias Moss (never heard of her). At that point, I only had to skip a handful of pages to mercifully end the chapter and the book as far as I was concerned.

Lyric Powers is a good example of what I like and dislike about literary criticism: it's at its best when dealing with literary history (authors, movements, etc) or actual technique, but it goes off the rails and becomes self-serving in a way only academic writing can when it lets in almost anything else.… (mehr)