Time to brush up on your iambic pentameter. The stuff of snoozy 10th-grade English classes is popping up in surprising places: Earlier this year, Seamus Heaney's translation of the centuries-old epic poem Beowulf spent 12 weeks as a New York Times best-seller. Monster.com ads took Robert Frost's ''road less traveled,'' while Ogilvy & Mather dusted off T.S. Eliot's ''The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'' for an AIG insurance TV spot. It's not all about old-school verse, either: Knopf hired Deborah Garrison, 35, author of 1998's poetry collection A Working Girl Can't Win, to attract fresh voices to its list. And American Airlines passed out 100,000 anthologies to international fliers during April's National Poetry Month. ''Poetry fits in with this hyper-accelerated age,'' says the American Poetry & Literacy Project's Andrew Carroll. ''Compared with a novel, digesting a short form is much easier.''
Books
Book Headlines
- Holiday Gift Guide: The A-List!
- 'The Sandman' turns 20
- Books' opening lines: You get the last word!
- 25 Entertainers of the Year!
- Artie Lange gets literary
- More Book Headlines
Today's
Most Popular
Book Reviews
- Wishful Drinking
- Last of the Old Guard
- American Lion
- The Sweet In-Between
- Disquiet, Please!
- More Book Reviews
Book Database
Book News
Ode News
Literature gets a face-lift -- Literary classics are popping up everywhere, from ''Beowulf'' as a ''New York Times'' bestseller to Robert Frost on Monster.com
The rules: Keep it clean, and stay on the subject or we might delete your comment.
If you see inappropriate language,
e-mail us.
You must have javascript enabled to submit a comment.
