Kenneth Millard
- Published in print:
- 1991
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122258
- eISBN:
- 9780191671395
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122258.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The poets writing in the first years of the 20th century have commonly been discussed in isolation. This book considers together seven poets — Henry Newbolt, John Masefield, Thomas ...
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The poets writing in the first years of the 20th century have commonly been discussed in isolation. This book considers together seven poets — Henry Newbolt, John Masefield, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, A. E. Housman, John Davidson, and Rupert Brooke — and argues that their work is worthy of more serious critical attention than it has previously received. Through an analysis of numerous individual poems, the chapter isolates certain common concerns: the changing and perhaps fading value of England; a distrust of the medium of language itself; a distrust also of the creative imagination. In its reassessment of these poets, the book provides a literary context for their work, finding in it a kind of pre-War modern British poetry distinct from the Modernism of subsequent decades. In establishing a literary context for the poetry of this century's first decade the book offers a revision of modern literary history and points towards an alternative line in 20th-century British poetry that culminates in the work of Philip Larkin.
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The poets writing in the first years of the 20th century have commonly been discussed in isolation. This book considers together seven poets — Henry Newbolt, John Masefield, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, A. E. Housman, John Davidson, and Rupert Brooke — and argues that their work is worthy of more serious critical attention than it has previously received. Through an analysis of numerous individual poems, the chapter isolates certain common concerns: the changing and perhaps fading value of England; a distrust of the medium of language itself; a distrust also of the creative imagination. In its reassessment of these poets, the book provides a literary context for their work, finding in it a kind of pre-War modern British poetry distinct from the Modernism of subsequent decades. In establishing a literary context for the poetry of this century's first decade the book offers a revision of modern literary history and points towards an alternative line in 20th-century British poetry that culminates in the work of Philip Larkin.
William May
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199583379
- eISBN:
- 9780191723193
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199583379.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book is a full-length study of the British novelist, poet, and illustrator Stevie Smith (1902–71). It draws on extensive archival material to offer new insights into her work, ...
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This book is a full-length study of the British novelist, poet, and illustrator Stevie Smith (1902–71). It draws on extensive archival material to offer new insights into her work, challenging conventional readings of her as a dotty eccentric. It reveals the careful control with which she managed her public persona, reassesses her allusive poetry in the light of her own conflicted response to written texts, and traces her simultaneous preoccupation with and fear of her reading public. The book follows her work through draft and proof stages, showing her reluctance to cede editorial control to her publishers, considers how her performances undermine her printed texts, and explores her use of fiction and book reviews as a way of generating contexts for her poetry. It also draws on reader-response theory to re-examine the construction of her literary biography in her novels and essays, recasting her as mastermind, rather than victim, of her own critical reputation. The book is also the first to consider the influence of artists such as George Grosz and Aubrey Beardsley on her apparently artless illustrations, offering readers a fascinating in-depth study that not only radically alters our understanding of Smith and her work, but offers new perspectives on British twentieth-century poetry and its reception.
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This book is a full-length study of the British novelist, poet, and illustrator Stevie Smith (1902–71). It draws on extensive archival material to offer new insights into her work, challenging conventional readings of her as a dotty eccentric. It reveals the careful control with which she managed her public persona, reassesses her allusive poetry in the light of her own conflicted response to written texts, and traces her simultaneous preoccupation with and fear of her reading public. The book follows her work through draft and proof stages, showing her reluctance to cede editorial control to her publishers, considers how her performances undermine her printed texts, and explores her use of fiction and book reviews as a way of generating contexts for her poetry. It also draws on reader-response theory to re-examine the construction of her literary biography in her novels and essays, recasting her as mastermind, rather than victim, of her own critical reputation. The book is also the first to consider the influence of artists such as George Grosz and Aubrey Beardsley on her apparently artless illustrations, offering readers a fascinating in-depth study that not only radically alters our understanding of Smith and her work, but offers new perspectives on British twentieth-century poetry and its reception.
Michael Wood
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199557660
- eISBN:
- 9780191701726
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199557660.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This is a book about how poetry, seen through the instance of a single poem, seeks to make sense of a turbulent and dangerous world. Poetry must introduce order and shape where there is ...
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This is a book about how poetry, seen through the instance of a single poem, seeks to make sense of a turbulent and dangerous world. Poetry must introduce order and shape where there is none, and also, in certain crucial cases, remain faithful to the disorder and shapelessness of experience. Many poems manage the first of these tasks; very few manage both. W. B. Yeats ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ (written and first published in 1921) is one of them. It is a work which asks what happens when what is taken to be civilization crumbles. What apocalyptic events wait in the wings? What are history's victims (and executors) to do except mock and mourn? Successive chapters investigate the six parts of the poem, connecting them to Yeats' broader poetic practice, his interest in the occult and his changing vision of Irish nationalism; to the work of other poets (Irish, English, Russian German); and to Irish and European history between 1916 (the date of the Easter Uprising in Dublin) and 1923 (the date of the end of the Irish Civil War). Theoretical considerations of the shape and meaning of violence, both political and religious, link the chapters to each other.
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This is a book about how poetry, seen through the instance of a single poem, seeks to make sense of a turbulent and dangerous world. Poetry must introduce order and shape where there is none, and also, in certain crucial cases, remain faithful to the disorder and shapelessness of experience. Many poems manage the first of these tasks; very few manage both. W. B. Yeats ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ (written and first published in 1921) is one of them. It is a work which asks what happens when what is taken to be civilization crumbles. What apocalyptic events wait in the wings? What are history's victims (and executors) to do except mock and mourn? Successive chapters investigate the six parts of the poem, connecting them to Yeats' broader poetic practice, his interest in the occult and his changing vision of Irish nationalism; to the work of other poets (Irish, English, Russian German); and to Irish and European history between 1916 (the date of the Easter Uprising in Dublin) and 1923 (the date of the end of the Irish Civil War). Theoretical considerations of the shape and meaning of violence, both political and religious, link the chapters to each other.
