Singing masters : poets in English, 1500 to the present / Russell Fraser.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fraser, Russell A.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English poetry--History and criticism.

English poetry.

English poetry--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

Physical Description:

viii, 261 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [1999]

Summary:

Singing Masters is a book for connoisseurs of poetry. It spans five centuries of verse in English, but it is in no way a literary history or encyclopedic survey of the genre. It is instead a celebration of the poetry that has most delighted, engaged, and challenged one man over his long and distinguished career as literary scholar and critic.

Russell Fraser's focus is on seventeen poets, including chapters on Donne, Herrick, Wordsworth, Milton, Shelley, and Marvell, with reference to many other poets along the way. The effort is not to be comprehensive, or even chronological (as the author points out, poetry, unlike the sciences, does not get better and better), but to record the impact of poetry on one man's sensibility, necessarily different from anyone else's. The account is personal -- the distillation of a lifetime's experience. However, paying dose attention to previous critics, Singing Masters is not impressionistic.

The title comes from Yeats, a poet who wanted his predecessors to be the "singing masters" of his soul. Similarly, author Russell Fraser pays homage to his predecessors among the major critics. He doesn't read his poets in a vacuum, but locates them in their lives and times while simultaneously focusing on the work itself. In this book, the poem is the thing, and the basic questions explored are language-centered: what kind of poem is before the reader and whether it succeeds and why.

Contents:

I. The Poetry of Innuendoes

1. Shakespeare at Sonnets 3

2. Sex and Science in Donne 20

3. Herrick among the Goths 39

4. Wordsworth Pro and Con 55

5. Frost in the Waste Land 71

II. The Poetry of Inflections

6. Jonson's Small Latin and Less Greek 93

7. Sidney for Moderns 109

8. Spenser in the Minotaur's Cave 125

9. Milton's Two Poets 139

10. Rationalism and the Discursive Style 149

11. What Is Augustan Poetry? 159

12. Remembering Shelley 179

III. The Hymn in the Throat

13. Herbert at Play in the Fields of the Lord 187

14. Marvell's Tin Ear 205

15. Arnold between Worlds 223

16. How Yeats Came into His Strength 238.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0472110039

OCLC:

40545373