Handbook for the damned
Poetry is dead. – At best, its spirit haunts the underworld of current artistic culture, its identity relegated to the status of a minor art-form. How did this happen? And does it matter? Handbook for the Damned is a poetically-written and highly-charged polemic that answers the first question with rigorous analytical clarity, and the second with a passionate affirmative.
Poetry not only matters, it is a matter of cultural life and death. In calling for a renaissance of poetry, the Handbook argues that in its purest form the spirit of poetry is the torch without which literature’s cultural beacon cannot be lit. It further avers that poetry represents the summit of a culture’s literary achievement, and that in unifying emotion and reason poetry achieves what no other art-form can manage. Insodoing, the Handbook claims that poetry sets standards the conscious adoption of which are vital for the maintenance of the artistic health of culture itself.
