In this enchanting book, Alexander (One Dry Season, 1989) chronicles her journeys to the exotic places that inspired Coleridge's masterpiece ``Kubla Khan.'' In 1797 or 1798, in an opium-induced reverie, the poet wrote of Xanadu, with its ``walls and towers...girdled round,'' its ``caves of ice,'' its ``mighty fountain,'' and ``Mount Abora.'' Yet the poem's most arresting images are based not on actual visits made by Coleridge, but on written accounts of them penned by others—from Marco Polo to 18th-century American botanists. Thus, Alexander offers as much an exploration of actual geographical terrain as a wide-ranging account of the textual sources that inspired the poet (whom she artfully dubs an ``armchair Odysseus''). Using the poem as her map, she ventures through Inner Mongolia to the ruins of Shangdu (the proper name for Xanadu), Kashmir, Ethiopia, northern Florida, and finally to the poem's literal place of origin on the southwest coast of England. However, she often finds disappointment at the end of her journeys; the legendary Xanadu is little more than ``the bare bones of [a] ruined vanished city.'' But, she muses consolingly, ``I am not convinced that the map of...our tracks...adequately and completely describes the terrain we trod. The truest manifestation...may be that which none of us will ever see.'' Written in robust prose, her book is full of delightful and surprising details about the places today, and she poses thoughtful questions about the nature of experience: Does the real world ever live up to our imaginings, the fantastic visions of our minds and the accounts wrought from them? Though Alexander's journeys sometimes fall below her expectations, the same could scarcely be said of her fine book. The Way to Xanadu is a testament to one woman's dauntless intellectual curiosity and an exquisitely crafted paean to a great poem and to the timeless march of human inquiry and imagination.
Pub Date: June 14, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41900-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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