Amazon.com description: Product Description: `Goodbye to the Art of Poetry' is the text of Peter Levi's valedictory lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry. Unlike his inaugural lecture `The Lamentation of the Dead', it is written in verse - in the couplets which he first used for a series of sermons in the sixties.

Nothing could be less like a lecture or a sermon than this essay in poetry. Like much of Peter Levi's critical writing, it is direct and intimate in tone, forthright and challenging in its opinions. It communicates the insights of a lifetime's love of poetry, and a knowledge both broad and deep, with passion and conviction. Few contemporary writers have written on poetry with such a blend of candour, discrimination and vision. He ranges widely over poets ancient and modern, the roots of poetry in the common language, and its role and obligations today.