A little history of poetry / John Carey.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Carey, John, 1934- Author.

Series:

Little histories (Yale University Press)

Little Histories

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poetry--History and criticism.

Poetry.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (321 pages).

Place of Publication:

2020.

New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work—over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem "great" in the first place. This little history shines a light on the richness and variation of the world’s poems—and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.

Contents:

Gods, heroes and monsters : The Epic of Gilgamesh

War, adventure, love : Homer, Sappho

Latin classics : Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Catullus, Juvenal

Anglo-Saxon poetry : Beowulf, laments and riddles

Continental masters of the Middle Ages : Dante, Daniel, Petrarch, Villon

A European poet : Chaucer

Poets of the seen world and the unseen : The Gawain poet, Hafez, Langland

Tudor Court poets : Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser

Elizabethan love poets : Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney

Copernicus in poetry : John Donne

An age of individualism : Jonson, Herrick, Marvell

Religious individualists : Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne

Poetry from the world beyond : John Milton

The Augustan age : Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Goldsmith

The other Eighteenth Century : Montagu, Egerton, Finch, Tollet, Leapor, Yearsley, Barbauld, Blamire, Baillie, Wheatley, Duck, Clare, Thomson, Cowper, Crabbe, Gray, Smart

Communal poetry : popular ballads and hymns

Lyrical ballads, and after : Wordsworth and Coleridge

Second-generation romantics : Keats and Shelley

Romantic eccentrics : Blake, Byron, Burns

From Romanticism to Modernism in German poetry : Goethe, Heine, Rilke

Making Russian literature : Pushkin, Lermontov

Great Victorians : Tennyson, Browning, Clough, Arnold

Reform, resolve and religion, Victorian women poets : Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti

American revolutionaries : Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson

Shaking the foundations : Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Valéry, Dylan Thomas, Edward Lear, Charles Dodgson, Swinburne, Katharine Harris Bradley, Edith Emma Cooper, Charlotte Mew, Oscar Wilde

New voices at the end of an era : Hardy, Housman, Kipling, Hopkins

The Georgian poets : Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, W.H. Davies, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, W.W. Gibson, Robert Graves, D.H. Lawrence

Poetry of the First World War : Stadler, Toller, Grenfell, Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg, Gurney, Cole, Cannan, Sinclair, McCrae

The great escapist : W.B. Yeats

Inventing Modernism : Eliot, Pound

West meets East : Waley, Pound, the Imagists

American Modernists : Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Esther Popel, Helene Johnson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes

Getting over Modernism : Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop

The Thirties poets : Auden, Spender, MacNeice

Poetry of the Second World War : Douglas, Lewis, Keyes, Fuller, Ross, Causley, Reed, Simpson, Shapiro, Wilbur, Jarrell, Pudney, Ewart, Sitwell, Feinstein, Stanley-Wrench, Clark

American confessional poets, and others : Lowell, Berryman, Snodgrass, Sexton, Roethke

The movement poets and associates : Larkin, Enright, Jennings, Gunn, Betjeman, Stevie Smith

Fatal attractions : Hughes, Plath

Poets in politics : Tagore, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Brodsky, Lorca, Neruda, Paz, Seferis, Seifert, Herbert, MacDiarmid, R.S. Thomas, Amichai

Poets who cross boundaries : Heaney, Walcott, Angelou, Oliver, Murray.

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 26 May 2020)

ISBN:

9780300252521

0300252528

OCLC:

1143629391