Poetry is often regarded as impenetrable by otherwise literate and cultivated persons. Yet the very same people have no difficulty in following written or spoken prose of an equal level of complexity - and often of much less intrinsic interest. No doubt this oddity has many causes, but often it is not individual peculiarity but a variety of social factors that produces and inability to absorb from a poem impressions of the same order as our intimate experience of life. In Poetry and the Common Life, the poet and critic M.L. Rosenthal explores the sources of poetry in our daily lives, in the common speech, in the awareness and sensibility that poets share with the rest of humanity. Through examples drawn from a wide range of our poetry, Rosenthal shows how that art, as a natural human activity, "brings out the latent music of our awareness in such a way that we recognize ourselves as never before." Rosenthal reintroduces us to those elements of poetry that speak to our daily preoccupations. He explores poetry's relation to our surroundings; the human value of intense awareness; the continual impingement of politics on our consciousness; our shared experience of sex and love and death; and our love of language. this is a simple, eloquent, and quietly revolutionary book. - Back cover.