Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Name	Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Poetry, Poetics, Literature
Publisher	Princeton University Press
Pub date	1974–2012
Media type	Print

Contents

Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is a comprehensive reference work surveying global traditions of verse, metrics, form, and criticism. The encyclopedia maps the practices of poets and theorists across periods and regions, situating entries alongside figures from Homer and Dante Alighieri to William Shakespeare, Li Bai, and Anna Akhmatova. It serves as a cross-reference hub for scholarship on authors such as T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Pablo Neruda, Matsuo Bashō, and institutions including Princeton University, Columbia University, and Cambridge University Press.

Overview

The work is organized as a multi-volume, alphabetically arranged compendium linking the poetics of traditions represented by poets like John Milton, Geoffrey Chaucer, Rumi, Federico García Lorca, and Emily Dickinson with critical movements such as Romanticism, Modernism, Symbolism, Surrealism, and Imagism. Entries cross-reference matters associated with journals like Poetry, presses such as Faber and Faber, and prizes exemplified by the Nobel Prize in Literature, Pulitzer Prize, and Booker Prize. The encyclopedia situates formal devices in relation to historical events including the French Revolution, World War I, and World War II, and connects authors to schools and institutions like Sorbonne, Harvard University, and University of Oxford.

First issued in the 1970s by Princeton University Press, the encyclopedia emerged amid conversations involving editors and scholars associated with bodies like the Modern Language Association and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Subsequent editions responded to shifts reflected in anthologies from Faber and Faber and critical interventions by figures connected to Yale University Press and Cambridge University Press. Later revisions incorporated global scholarship and comparative studies linked to centers such as SOAS University of London, University of California, Berkeley, and archival projects housed at institutions like the Library of Congress and the British Library.

Entries range from concise definitions and biographies to extended treatments of forms (e.g., the sonnet, villanelle, ghazal) associable with poets like Francesco Petrarca, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Paul Verlaine, Mirabai, and Rainer Maria Rilke. The encyclopedia maps metrics and prosody alongside notated examples rooted in traditions from Classical Athens and Heian period Japan to the courts of Mughal Empire and the literatures of Imperial China. Cross-references tie technical terms to canonical works such as The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, Leaves of Grass, One Hundred Poems of Tang Dynasty, and to movements associated with editors and reviewers at outlets like The New Yorker and The Times Literary Supplement.

Editorial practice combined scholarly editors with contributors drawn from universities and cultural institutions: professors and critics affiliated with Harvard University, University of Chicago, Columbia University, Princeton University, Oxford University, McGill University, Université Paris-Sorbonne, and University of Tokyo. Contributors included specialists treating authors such as Anna Akhmatova, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fernando Pessoa, and Langston Hughes, as well as comparative scholars working on translation and reception tied to figures like Gregory Rabassa and Edward Said. The editorial apparatus reflects bibliographic conventions comparable to those used by Oxford University Press and cataloging systems at the British Library and Library of Congress.

Scholars and institutions praised the encyclopedia for consolidating dispersed scholarship on poets like Sappho, Virgil, Matsuo Bashō, Basho, Anna Seghers, and for framing debates about canon formation involving critics from Yale University, Columbia University, and University of California, Los Angeles. Reviews in venues connected to The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, and journals published by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press situate its influence alongside encyclopedic projects such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica and reference series from Routledge. The work has been used in curricula at Princeton University, Yale University, Harvard University, and conservatories and has shaped anthologies and translations by presses including Penguin Books and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Major editions were published in multiple print runs by Princeton University Press with updated editorial boards, supplementing earlier compendia like those issued by Cambridge University Press and Routledge. Translations and international collaborations involved scholars connected to the University of São Paulo, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Peking University, Seoul National University, and centers in Istanbul and Cairo. The encyclopedia’s editions have been cataloged in bibliographies at the Library of Congress and adopted in collections at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the German National Library.

Category:Encyclopedias