Drinks with Dead Poets: A Season of Poe, Whitman, Byron, and the Brontes - Hardcover

Defiantly and exhilaratingly poetic. I like the urgency and stringency of Maxwell's advice, and it should be useful to students coming to a poem. Arguing with this book is part of the joy of it: it's provocative and opinionated and personal and urgent; by turns good-humored and intemperate; and full of earned advice on the writing and reading of poems.--Nick Laird

Part comic novel, part confession, part literary critique, Maxwell's book is both creative and self-indulgent, packed with quotations, musings, and dissections of rhyme schemes.

This novel packs so much truth and so many conspicuously educational moments--along with character studies of 12 major nineteenth-century poets and writers--that it defies classification. An intoxicating blend of fiction, memoir, and literary criticism.

Maxwell blurs the lines between prose and poetry and between fiction and reality as he takes readers on a surreal journey full of literary criticism and metrical analyses, all guided by the visiting poets who speak entirely in quotes from their real-life journals and letters. The surreal quality of the writing is offset by Maxwell's wonderfully dry sense of humor. Readers of metafiction will enjoy this rabbit hole of luminary poets.

Part dream-memoir, part picaresque novel, and part defense of the poetic art form, the book is a wholly brilliant and often comical evocation of a mysterious university campus, its students and visiting lecturers, and the altogether precarious status of poetry within contemporary academia. Brilliant.

“I am walking along a country lane with no earthly idea why . . .”Poet Glyn Maxwell wakes up in a mysterious village one autumn day. He has no idea how he got there—is he dead? In a coma? Dreaming?—but he has a strange feeling there’s a class to teach. And isn’t that the poet Keats wandering down the lane? Why not ask him to give a reading, do a Q and A, hit the pub with the students afterwards?Soon the whole of the autumn term stretches ahead, with Byron, Yeats and Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, the Brownings, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Wilfred Owen, and many more all on their way to give readings in the humble village hall.And everything these famed personalities say—in class, on stage, at the Cross Keys pub—comes verbatim from these poets’ diaries, essays, or letters. A dreamy novel of a profound autumn term with Poe, Yeats, Whitman, Dickinson, and the Brontës.