The winnowing fan

Exploring the ways in which how we write about poetry - the language, forms and styles of criticism - lies at the heart of our critical engagement with poetry, The Winnowing Fan presents a series of reflections that adopt the forms of poetry to write about poetry. Traversing a wide spectrum of poetic history, from Homer's Odyssey, through the work of French symbolists such as Mallarme to modern writers such as W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney, Christopher Norris seeks to free criticism and theory from conventional academic forms and return it to an engagement with the practice of literature itself.