Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
This Craft of Verse

This Craft of Verse

Borges, Jorge Luis
Nguyen, Viet Thanh
Mihailescu, Calin-Andrei

Hardcover

Series: Charles Eliot Norton Lectures

Literary CriticismWriting InstructionPoetry Criticism

Publisher Price: $22.95

ISBN10: 0674302451
ISBN13: 9780674302457
Publisher: Belknap Press
Published: Sep 16 2025
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.60 Depth: 8.30
Language: English

A wondrously limpid testament to the pleasures of reading. --Steven Poole, The Guardian

Six incandescent lectures on literature from the patron saint of mirrors, metafiction, and infinite libraries.

For more than thirty years, Jorge Luis Borges's Norton Lectures went unpublished. Recorded at Harvard in 1967 and 1968, the tapes gathered dust in a library vault until their discovery after his death. It was a twist that the author of Labyrinths would have relished. This volume assembles the recovered materials, offering a priceless window into the Argentinian master's lifelong love affair with the English language.

This Craft of Verse captures the cadences, candor, wit, and erudition of one of the twentieth century's enduring literary voices. Though his avowed topic is poetry, Borges explores subjects ranging from prose forms--especially the novel--to literary history, translation theory, and philosophical aspects of communication writ large. Borges here draws on a wide range of literary examples--modern and medieval English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese. He brings characteristic eloquence and inexhaustible enthusiasm to readings of Plato, the Old Norse kenningar, Byron, Poe, Chesterton, Joyce, and Frost, as well as translations of Homer, the Bible, and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

Whether discussing metaphor, the origins of verse, or his own poetic creed, Borges gives a performance as entertaining as it is intellectually engaging. A lesson in the love of literature and the making of a unique artistic sensibility, This Craft of Verse is a sustained encounter with one of the writers whose place in the twentieth century will be forever remembered.

Also from

Borges, Jorge Luis

View All

Also in

Poetry Criticism

View All