The alcaic metre in the English imagination / John Talbot.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Talbot, John, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--History and criticism.

English literature.

English language--Rhythm.

English language.

English language--Versification.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (256 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Distribution:

[London, England] : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022

Place of Publication:

London [England] : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

"This book traces a neglected strand of English literary history and criticism: how a remarkable ancient Greek and Latin poetic form - the stanza known as the Alcaic strophe - found its way into English poetry, and continues shaping it today. English poets have always admired the extraordinary beauty and intricacy of the Alcaic stanza - Tennyson called it 'the grandest of all measures'. But their imaginative receptions of the form in English have been largely ignored. The relative fame and prestige of another Greek lyric form - the Sapphic stanza - has obscured the role the Alcaic has played in English poetry. This book brings the Alcaic stanza out of Sappho's shadow. John Talbot alters our view of literary history, exposing surprising connections between writers across five centuries, including Mary Sidney Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Blake, Tennyson, Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Bridges, Wilfred Owen, and W. H. Auden. It gives special attention to a remarkable proliferation of Alcaics in English during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and what that reveals about the place of the classics in contemporary culture. It also casts light on the English poetic imagination, showing how the rhythmic variety and complexity of the Alcaic stanza inspired modern poets to push the limits of English prosody by inventing completely new English metrical structures."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Preface 'Curious Prosodic Fauna' 'To Tease the Metrists': Robert Frost and an Ancient Metre Tennyson and the Metrification of Catullus 'Carminibus Stupens': The Metres of Sappho and Alcaeus 'The Grandest of All Measures' 'An Irreducibly Literary Project'

Chapter I Coming Late to Latin: Horace / Wilfred Own, John Hollander Metrical Misquotation 'Occasional Metrical Outrages' Coming Late to Latin Footnotes and 'The Implication of Forgotten Knowledge' Metre, Childhood and Metrical Signatures John Hollander's Preposterous Alcaics

Chapter II 'A Marvel of Metrical Disruptions': The Alcaic Strophe Itself 'Their Slightest / Movements The Aesthetic of a Metrical Scheme 'The Current Unfashionablility of Metrics' Horatian Spaciousness Horace's 'Pivot Syllable' Poetic Punctuation: Horace's Fixed Caesura Latin Alcaics After Horace

Chapter III 'Blossom Again on a Colder Isle': Tennyson's Alcaics and the Invention of English Metres English Alcaics Before Tennyson 'A Metre which I have Invented' Horace's Voice, Horace's Accent 'A Much Freer and Lighter Movement' 'Blossom Again on a Colder Isle' A New English Stanza

Chapter IV 'The Same but Not the Same': Tennyson's In Memoriam Stanza 'In Outline and No More' Fitzgerald's Rubáiyat : 'Somewhat as in the Alcaic' A Forgotten Victorian Critical Commonplace The Art of Minute Alterations Horace Half-Embraced: In Memoriam 89 and 90 'Who Would Keep an Ancient Form?' Swinburne's 'Sapphics' and Re-membering the Metrical Body 'Changes Wrought on Form and Face'

Chapter V 'If You Can't Hear It, It's Not There': Bridges, Auden, and the End of the Classical Cadence 'Far-sought Effects' 'No art of English Poetry at All' 'No Accepted Grammar of Method' 'I Could not Hear the Verse' A New Prosody An Outpouring of Alcaics 'In Tester Times it / was Different' An Alcaic Hybrid The End of the Cadence

Afterword 'I Sing to Display my Alcaics' Weekend in Las Vegas 'Free Verse / Without Attention to / Line Breaks' 'Lacking Latin, He Follows his Master Visually' Can't Name Now, Can' Bear to Part With.

Other Format:

Print version:

ISBN:

9781350232525

9781350232518

OCLC:

1291221858

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.