Frank Mulberry Knoll Frank Lloyd Wright and Poetry

Thousands of books and articles have been written about nearly every aspect of the life and designs of the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Frank Lloyd Wright and Poetry is the only study of an important but previously overlooked component of the architect's personality and work: his love of poetry. Throughout his life, Wright was a passionate reader of poetry, spoke about his love of poetry in his own writings, and in his early years wrote poems himself.This book proposes that Wright's love of poetry actually influenced the development of his architecture in certain ways. In his early "Prairie House" period, around 1900, he was drawn especially to conventional American poetry such as that of Edgar Allan Poe. The structure of Poe's poems--their meter, rhyme schemes, and other patterns are shown to be parallel to underlying patterns of Wright's designs of this period.Later in his life, Wright's favorite poet was Walt Whitman, whose poetry was revolutionary in its rejection of conventional forms, and in its creation of totally new concepts of poetry.Starting in the 1920s, Wright's architecture became very different from his earlier work--liberated from conventional forms and similar in certain ways to the structural traits of Whitman's poetry.Frank Lloyd Wright and Poetry demonstrates a new way of looking at the architect's work. The architectural historian Richard Longstreth has said that the book provides "a whole new dimension of the architect's thinking . . . and creative method."