Background
Burt was born in 1971, the son of Jeffrey Burt, a lawyer, and Sandra C., a writer and radio producer.
Cambridge, MA, United States
Burt was educated at Harvard University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1994.
Holywell St, Oxford OX1 3BN, United Kingdom
Burt went to New College, Oxford University from 1994 to 1995.
New Haven, CT 06520, United States
Burt received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 2000.
(''To read Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden is to read the b...)
''To read Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden is to read the best-equipped of American critics of poetry of the past century on the best-equipped of its Anglo-American poets, and we rush to read, perhaps, less out of an academic interest in fair judgment than out of a spectator's love of virtuosity in flight.'' From Adam Gopnik's foreword Randall Jarrell was one of the most important poet-critics of the past century, and the poet who most fascinated and infuriated him was W. H. Auden. In Auden, Jarrell found a crucial poetic influence that needed to be both embraced and resisted. During the 1940s, Jarrell wrestled with Auden's work, writing a series of notorious articles on Auden that remain admired and controversial examples of devoted and contentious criticism. While Jarrell never completed his proposed book on Auden, these previously unpublished lectures revise and reprise his earlier articles and present new insights into Auden's work. Delivered at Princeton University in 1951 and 1952, Jarrell's lectures reflect a passionate appreciation of Auden's work, a witty attack from an informed opponent, and an important document of a major poet's reception. Jarrell's lectures offer readings of many of Auden's works, including all of his long poems, and illuminate his singular use of a variety of stylistic registers and poetic genres. In the lecture based on the article ''Freud to Paul,'' Jarrell traces the ideas and ideologies that animated and, at times, overwhelmed Auden's poetry. More precisely, he considers the influence of left-liberal politics, psychoanalytic and evolutionary theory, and the idiosyncratic Christian theology that characterized Auden's poems of the 1940s. While an admiring and sympathetic reader, Jarrell does not avoid identifying Auden's poetic failures and political excesses. He offers occasionally blistering assessments of individual poems and laments Auden's turn from a cryptic, feeling, impassioned poet to a rhetorical, self-conscious one. Stephen Burt's introduction provides a backdrop to the lectures and their reception and importance for the history of modern poetry.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01HX2WT10/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0
2005
(Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) was the most influential poet...)
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) was the most influential poetry critic of his generation. He was also a lyric poet, comic novelist, translator, children's book author, and close friend of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, and many other important writers of his time. Jarrell won the 1960 National Book Award for poetry and served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Amid the resurgence of interest in Randall Jarrell, Stephen Burt offers this brilliant analysis of the poet and essayist. Burt's book examines all of Jarrell's work, incorporating new research based on previously undiscovered essays and poems. Other books have examined Jarrell's poetry in biographical or formal terms, but none have considered both his aesthetic choices and their social contexts. Beginning with an overview of Jarrell's life and loves, Burt argues that Jarrell's poetry responded to the political questions of the 1930s, the anxieties and social constraints of wartime America, and the apparent prosperity, domestic ideals, and professional ideology that characterized the 1950s. Jarrell's work is peopled by helpless soldiers, anxious suburban children, trapped housewives, and lonely consumers. Randall Jarrell and His Age situates the poet-critic among his peers - including Bishop, Lowell, and Arendt - in literature and cultural criticism. Burt considers the ways in which Jarrell's efforts and achievements encompassed the concerns of his time, from teen culture to World War II to the Cuban Missile Crisis; the book asks, too, how those efforts might speak to us now.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009DMJDBI/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i1
(This book answers a number of fundamental questions about...)
This book answers a number of fundamental questions about listening in coaching and mentoring. What difference does being heard make to the speaker? How does it have that effect? What are the necessary components of good listening? How do you evaluate your practice as a listener and how do you improve? The process of writing this book led the author to look closely at his own practice, test, experiment, and push his listening to a higher level. He invites the reader to do the same. This book identifies what it takes to listen well – the skills, mind-set, presence, self-awareness and self-management – and why it can be hard. It demonstrates how four modes of listening – attention, inquiry, observation and use of self – all contribute to the listener’s understanding and to the speaker’s awareness. It argues that we all have a ‘learning edge’ as listeners and provides a framework that helps each of us find it. The book is intended as a companion for anyone who commits to becoming a good listener. It shows how to develop expertise in the four modes of listening. It offers examples and principles to guide practice, questions for reflection, and a series of ‘workouts’ to help the listener develop their ability to listen. It encourages by showing how good listening is simple – you turn up, pay attention, and listen with all you have, and it challenges by identifying the work it takes to do that.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07S2SD9LL/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i2
(Early in the twentieth century, Americans and other Engli...)
Early in the twentieth century, Americans and other English-speaking nations began to regard adolescence as a separate phase of life. Associated with uncertainty, inwardness, instability, and sexual energy, adolescence acquired its own tastes, habits, subcultures, slang, economic interests, and art forms. This new idea of adolescence became the driving force behind some of the modern era's most original poetry. Stephen Burt demonstrates how adolescence supplied the inspiration and at times the formal principles, on which many twentieth-century poets founded their works. William Carlos Williams and his contemporaries fashioned their American verse in response to the idealization of new kinds of youth in the 1910s and 1920s. W. H. Auden's early work, Philip Larkin's verse, Thom Gunn's transatlantic poetry, and Basil Bunting's late-modernist masterpiece, Briggflatts, all track the development of adolescence in Britain as it moved from the private space of elite schools to the urban public space of sixties subcultures. The diversity of American poetry from the Second World War to the end of the sixties illuminates poets' reactions to the idea that teenagers, juvenile delinquents, hippies, and student radicals might, for better or worse, transform the nation. George Oppen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Robert Lowell in particular built and rebuilt their sixties styles in reaction to changing concepts of youth. Contemporary poets continue to fashion new ideas of youth. Laura Kasischke and Jorie Graham focus on the discoveries of specifically female adolescence. The Irish poet Paul Muldoon and the Australian poet John Tranter use teenage perspectives to represent a postmodernist uncertainty. Other poets have rejected traditional and modern ideas of adolescence, preferring instead to view this age as a reflection of the uncertainties and restricted tastes of the way we live now. The first comprehensive study of adolescence in twentieth-century poetry, The Forms of Youth recasts the history of how English-speaking cultures began to view this phase of life as a valuable state of consciousness, if not the very essence of a Western identity.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008RO3XUA/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i3
Burt was born in 1971, the son of Jeffrey Burt, a lawyer, and Sandra C., a writer and radio producer.
Burt was educated at Harvard University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1994. He then went to New College, Oxford University from 1994 to 1995, and later received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 2000.
Burt is an assistant professor of English at Minnesota's Macalester College. His first book of poems, Popular Music, won the Colorado Prize for Poetry, and Randall Jarrell and His Age, a critical appreciation of that American poet, adapted from Burt's doctoral thesis, put Burt on the map as a critic of note.
Burt's first book of poems appeared in 1999 while the author was still a doctoral candidate at Yale University. Popular Music contains forty-three selections arranged in four parts. Topics range from self-discovery to death to celebrations of other poets. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly felt that Burt "fused" inspiration from Jarrell to James Merrill and Spanish poet Jaime Gil de Biedma, and "the result is a sort of brilliant 'take back the night' raid on what is often called academic poetry." Burt provides something of a memoir in prose, sonnet, and free verse form, taking the reader from awareness of body through education and travel and on to themes of love and death. One of the first poems, "Kudzu," compares the fast-growing weed to the poet's "body I hated then, and hate."
Burt finished his dissertation, "Randall Jarrell and His Age," in 2000 and began at Macalester College as an assistant professor of English. He continued writing reviews and critical analyses on poets from Walt Whitman to Thom Gunn in domestic and international journals and also publishing his poetry in publications such as the Paris Review and Ploughshares. In 2003 he published an expanded form of his dissertation with Columbia University Press under the title Randall Jarrell and His Age. Jarrell, who lived from 1914 to 1965, was one of the most influential poets of his generation, admired and befriended by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Hannah Arendt, among others. The winner of the 1960 National Book Award for Poetry, Jarrell also served as a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, and in his critical reviews and studies championed the work of Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, and Bishop. The poet's work had received something of a renaissance with the publication of a collection of Jarrell's critical prose in 1999, No Other Book, edited by poet Brad Leithauser, and a memoir by the poet's widow the following year, Remembering Randall. Thus Burt's thesis came at an important moment for Jarrell studies. His work looks at all of Jarrell's output, both prose and verse - including poems, critical essays, translations, children's books, and a novel - and included recent research occasioned by the discovery of new poems and essays. Burt puts Jarrell's works squarely in their social context, opening with a section on the poet's life and loves, and then examining essays and poems as the outgrowth of their times: the 1930's and 1940's when economic anxiety prevailed, as well as wartime difficulties, and the 1950's and early 1960's when relative prosperity returned but culturally the United States had changed, busy fighting the Cold War. Burt addresses ways in which Jarrell is still very relevant to modern readers, plumbing many of the same concerns of the postmodern world.
Randall Jarrell and His Age won the Warren/Brooks Award as well as praise from the critics.
(Early in the twentieth century, Americans and other Engli...)
(This book answers a number of fundamental questions about...)
(Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) was the most influential poet...)
(''To read Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden is to read the b...)
2005Burt married Jessica C. Bennett in 2000.