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Power, Plain English, and the Rise of Modern Poetry
In this engaging book David Rosen offers a radically new account of Modern poetry and revises our understanding of its relation to Romanticism. British poets from Wordsworth to Auden attempted to present themselves simultaneously as persons of power and as moral voices in their communities. The modern lyric derives its characteristic complexities-psychological, ethical, formal-from the extraordinary difficulty of this effort.The low register of our language-a register of short, concrete, native words arranged in simple syntax-is deeply implicated in this story. Rosen shows how the peculiar reputation of \"plain English\" for truthfulness is employed by Modern poets to conceal the rift between their (probably irreconcilable) ambitions for themselves.With a deep appreciation for poetic accomplishment and a wonderful iconoclasm, Rosen sheds new light on the innovative as well as the self-deceptive aspects of Modern poetry. This book alters our understanding of the history of poetry in the English language.
eBook
Towers of Myth And Stone
In this critical study of the influence of W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) on the poetry and drama of Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962), Deborah Fleming examines similarities in imagery, landscape, belief in eternal recurrence, use of myth, distrust of rationalism, and dedication to tradition. Although Yeats’s and Jeffers’s styles differed widely, Towers of Myth and Stone examines how the two men shared a vision of modernity, rejected contemporary values in favor of traditions (some of their own making), and created poetry that sought to change those values. Jeffers’s well-known opposition to modernist poetry forced him for decades to the margins of critical appraisal, where he was seen as an eccentric without aesthetic content. Yet both Yeats and Jeffers formulated social and poetic philosophies that continue to find relevance in critical and cultural theory. Engaging Yeats’s work enabled Jeffers to develop a related, though distinct, sense of what themes and subject matter were best suited for poetic endeavor. His connection to Yeats helps to explain the nature of Jeffers’s poetry even as it helps to clarify Yeats’s influence on those who followed him. Moreover, Fleming argues, Jeffers’s interest in Yeats suggests that critics misunderstand Jeffers if they take his rejection of modernism (as exemplified by Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound) as a rejection of contemporary poetry or the process by which modern poetry came into being.
eBook
Haunted English : the Celtic fringe, the British Empire, and de-anglicization
Taking the fin-de-siècle movements of the Gaelic revival and the Irish Literary Renaissance as her point of departure, O'Connor examines the effort to undo cultural cringe through language and literary activism.
eBook
Gender and modern Irish drama
Gender and Modern Irish Drama argues that the representations of
sacrificial violence central to the work of the Abbey playwrights are intimately
linked with constructions of gender and sexuality. Susan Cannon Harris goes beyond
an examination of the relationship between Irish national drama and Irish
nationalist politics to the larger question of the way national identity and gender
identity are constructed through each other. Radically redefining the context in
which the Abbey plays were performed, Harris documents the material and discursive
forces that produced Irish conceptions of gender. She looks at cultural
constructions of the human body and their influence on nationalist rhetoric, linking
the production and reception of the plays to conversations about public health,
popular culture, economic policy, and racial identity that were taking place inside
and outside the nationalist community. The book is both a crucial intervention in
Irish studies and an important contribution to the ongoing feminist project of
theorizing the production of gender and the body.
eBook
Serious poetry : form and authority from Yeats to Hill
Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about? The history of poetry in 20th-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a media culture. It is also, however, another history, one of form and authority, in which certain poets found modes and pitches of resistance to the seeming inevitabilities of their times. In this history, it is the authority of poetry (and not the media-processed poet) which is at stake in the integrity of poetic form. This book offers a controversial reading of 20th-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wystan Hugh Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Yeats's centrality to 20th-century poetry — and the problem many poets and critics had, or still have, with that centrality — is a major focus of the book. The book argues that it is in the strengths, possibilities, perplexities, and certainties of the poetic form that poetry's authority in a distrustful cultural climate remains most seriously alive.
eBook
Wisdom of two : the spiritual and literary collaboration of George and W.B. Yeats
W. B. Yeats searched throughout his life for a system of spiritual truth. From 1917 he and his wife did automatic writing, W. B. asking questions and George writing down answers from beyond their conscious selves. Harper thoroughly analyses this script, touching on a number of related topics including feminist issues of collaborative authorship.
eBook
Yeats and Theosophy
When H. P. Blavatsky, the controversial head of the turn of the century movement Theosophy, defined \"a true Theosophist\" in her book The Key to Theosophy, she could have just as easily have been describing W. B. Yeats. Blavatsky writes, \"A true Theosophist must put in practice the loftiest moral ideal, must strive to realize his unity with the whole of humanity, and work ceaselessly for others.\" Although Yeats joined Blavatsky's group in 1887, and subsequently left to help form The Golden Dawn in 1890, Yeats's career as poet and politician were very much in line with the methods set forth by Blavatsky's doctrine. My project explores how Yeats employs this pop-culture occultism in the creation of his own national literary aesthetic. This project not only examines the influence theosophy has on the literary work Yeats produced in the late 1880's and 1890's, but also Yeats's work as literary critic and anthology editor during that time. While Yeats uses theosophy's metaphysical world view to provide an underlying structure for some of his earliest poetry and drama, he uses theosophy's methods of investigation and argument to discover a metaphysical literary tradition which incorporates all of his own literary heroes into an Irish cultural tradition. Theosophy provides a methodology for Yeats to argue that both Shelley and Blake (for example) are part of a tradition that includes himself. Basing his argument in theosophy, Yeats can argue that the Irish people are a distinct race with a culture more \"sincere\" and \"natural\" than that of England.
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