Gin before breakfast : the dilemma of the poet in the newsroom / W. Dale Nelson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nelson, W. Dale.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poets, English--Biography.

Poets, English.

Journalists--Great Britain--Biography.

Journalists.

Great Britain.

Poets, American--Biography.

Poets, American.

Journalists--United States--Biography.

United States.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xix, 242 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Syracuse, N.Y. : Syracuse University Press, 2007.

Summary:

Archibald MacLeish wrote, "Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast." After more than forty years' experience as a journalist and poet, W. Dale Nelson gives a sharp and refreshing insight into the intriguing and tense relationship between these two very different fields of writing. His succinct studies of significant British and American poets, some famous and some obscure, range from Walt Whitman to Edmund Clarence Stedman, from Rudyard Kipling to Park Benjamin. In his chronicling of these powerful literary minds, Nelson raises compelling arguments about the journalistic environment and its effect on the development of poetic form, as well as the effects of changing print and mass communications on poetry.

Contents:

1 "I Will Write for the Permanent" 1

2 "A Wonderful and Ponderous Book" 22

3 "Something More Than Ordinary Journalistic Prose" 42

4 "Anything but Matter-of-Fact Life" 65

5 "Unhappily Smitten with the Love of Rhyme" 75

6 "The Crank of an Opinion-Mill" 90

7 "The Reputation of a Refined Poet" 102

8 "The Exhuming of Buried Reputations" 111

9 "Every Quality That Made Reporting a Misery" 121

10 "It Is Only Ignorance Which Is Boredom" 137

11 "As He Learned to Know It Day by Day" 150

12 "For Time to Keep" 165

13 "Perhaps I Have Become a Mere Reporter" 181.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 213-227) and index.

ISBN:

9780815608882

0815608888

OCLC:

85443949