Argument And Song: Sources & Silences in Poetry

Stanley Plumly is one of his generation's important poets. He was born in Barnesville, Ohio, in 1939, and grew up in the lumber and farming regions of Virginia and Ohio. Writing in The Atlantic, Peter Davison said of his work, "Plumly's rich, dense poems give off a special fragrance, the incense of the English Romantic movement mingling with forest odors from the Old Northwest Territory between the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Great Lakes."

This volume collects fifteen of Plumly's essays on poetry and art, including the seminal "Chapter and Verse," "Sentimental Forms," and "The Abrupt Edge." Meditating on poems by Keats, Stevens, James Wright, Plath, and Matthews, on Emily Bronte’s prose, and paintings by Whistler, Plumly returns again and again to essential the impulses, occasions, and places out of which art arises and the forms by which imagination gives it shape.

About Stanley Plumly's

"Reading Stanley Plumly is like having someone whisper unceasingly in your ear, humming of light, trees, sleep, snow."
- The New York Times Book Review

"Plumly&'s landscapes, for all their underpinnings in concrete detail, seem at times like sets in a Fellini softly falling snow, birds, suicides, and blossoming red roses, with flashes of insight that burn the retinas and leave an afterimage even more surreal."
- Kirkus Reviews

"The voice of [his] poems reveals a plaintiveness without sentimentality, weaving poignant stories that transcend mere narrative."
- The Boston Review