Poets & the Peacock dinner : the literary history of a meal / Lucy McDiarmid.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McDiarmid, Lucy, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English poetry--20th century--History and criticism.

English poetry.

Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, 1840-1922.

Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen.

Plarr, Victor, 1863-1929.

Plarr, Victor.

Moore, T. Sturge (Thomas Sturge), 1870-1944.

Moore, T. Sturge.

Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939.

Yeats, W. B.

Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972.

Pound, Ezra.

Aldington, Richard, 1892-1962.

Aldington, Richard.

Flint, F. S. (Frank Stuart), 1885-1960.

Flint, F. S.

Poets, English--20th century--Biography.

Poets, English.

Dinners and dining.

History.

England--Sussex.

Dinners and dining--England--Sussex--History--20th century.

Genre:

Biographies.

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Physical Description:

xvi, 212 pages ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2014.

Summary:

On January 18, 1914, seven male poets gathered to eat a peacock. W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, the celebrities of the group, led four lesser-known poets to the Sussex manor house of the man they were honouring, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: the poet, horse-breeder, Arabist, and anti-imperialist married to Byron's only granddaughter. In this story of the curious occasion that came to be known as the 'peacock dinner, ' immortalized in the famous photograph of the poets standing in a row, Lucy McDiarmid creates a new kind of literary history derived from intimacies rather than 'isms.' The dinner evolved from three close literary friendships, those between Pound and Yeats, Yeats and Lady Gregory, and Lady Gregory and Blunt, whose romantic affair thirty years earlier was unknown to the others. Through close readings of unpublished letters, diaries, memoirs, and poems, in an argument at all times theoretically informed, McDiarmid reveals the way marriage and adultery, as well as friendship, offer ways of transmitting the professional culture of poetry. Like the women who are absent from the photograph, the poets at its edges (F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington, Sturge Moore, and Victor Plarr) are also brought into the discussion, adding interest by their very marginality. This is literary history told with considerable style and brio, often comically aware of the extraordinary alliances and rivalries of the 'seven male poets' but attuned to significant issues in coterie formation, literary homosociality, and the development of modernist poetics from late-Victorian and Georgian beginnings. 00.

Contents:

1 Male Poets in Proximity 14

2 Lady Gregory's Ideas 40

3 Victorian Adultery 58

4 A Woman's Sonnets 76

5 Alliances and Rivalries 96

6 The Naked Muse 120

7 "a really important event" 136

8 A Live Tradition 156.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 177-204) and index.

ISBN:

9780198722786

0198722788

OCLC:

880557588