Don H. Bialostosky

Literary critic and teacher Don Bialostosky is committed to criticism that enhances pleasure in poetry. His latest book How to Play a Poem shares with a general audience a critical approach to enjoying poetry that grows out of years of teaching informed by the work of his earlier scholarly books. In his first book on Wordsworth, he looked for an alternative to literary theories that led critics to ridicule and misunderstand the poet's most experimental poems and showed how from a fresh critical angle they could be understood and enjoyed. In his second book he carried the perspective he drew from Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in the first book to provide fresh ways of enjoying more familiar Wordsworthian poems. Over the years he elaborated the theories from Bakhtin that informed his criticism and gathered them in Mikhail Bakhtin: Rhetoric, Poetics, Dialogics, Rhetoricality. How to Play a Poem distills the essence of the earlier scholarly and theoretical work and welcomes interested readers, teachers, and students into a course in how to bring poems pleasurably to life.