Adlestrop Revisited

Author: Anne Harvey
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 075249984X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
Edward Thomas never left the train that stopped briefly at a Cotswold station, Adlestrop, just before World War I, but what he saw resulted in one of the best known and loved English poems, Adlestrop. Generations of literary pilgrims have visited the village which inspired the poem, while many of today's writers have composed their own tributes to the poet and the place where, after the closure of the station, the nameboard was lovingly retained. This anthology explores Adlestrop's literary, topographical and railway associations. Anne Harvey investigates the origins of the poem: did the train really stop 'unwontedly'? Was it an express? Was Thomas travelling alone? His fascination with the railways began in boyhood and is seen in two of his little-known short stories, 'A Third-Class Carriage' and 'Death by Misadventure'. The book also examines the connection with Jane Austen, who visited her Leigh relatives at Adlestrop Park and Rectory, and there are poems from Peter Porter, Alan Brownjohn, P.J. Kavanagh, Dannie Abse and Brian Patten. A wide selection of illustrations includes facsimiles of Edward Thomas's original manuscript and notebook entries, photographs and fine wood engravings by well-known artists. This engaging anthology will appeal to all who have read and loved this classic poem.

The Past is a Foreign Country - Revisited

Author: David Lowenthal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521851424
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 679

Book Description
A completely updated new edition of David Lowenthal's classic account of how we reshape the past to serve present needs.

Edward Thomas: from Adlestrop to Arras

Author: Jean Moorcroft Wilson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408187140
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 513

Book Description
This is the extraordinary life of a poetic genius. Along with Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas is by any reckoning a major first world war poet. A war poet is not one who chooses to commemorate or celebrate a war, but one who reacts against having a war thrust upon him. His great friend Robert Frost wrote 'his poetry is so very brave, so unconsciously brave.' Apart from a most illuminating understanding of his poetry, Dr Wilson shows how Thomas' life alone makes for absorbing reading: his early marriage, his dependence on laudanum, his friendships with Joseph Conrad, Edward Garnett, Rupert Brooke and Hilaire Belloc among others. The novelist Eleanor Farjeon entered into a curious menage a trois with him and his wife. He died in France in 1917, on the first day of the Battle of Arras. This is the stuff of which myths are made and posterity has been quick to oblige. But this has tended to obscure his true worth as a writer, as Dr Wilson argues. Edward Thomas's poems were not published until some months after his death, but they have never since been out of print. Described by Ted Hughes as 'the father of us all', Thomas's distinctively modern sensibility is probably the one most in tune with our twenty-first century outlook. He occupies a crucial place in the development of twentieth century poetry.

Drafting and Assessing Poetry

Author: Sue Dymoke
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761948551
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
Based on theory but with a practical dimension, the book engages readers in current critical debates about poetry teaching and its place in an assessment-driven curriculum.

A Comparative History of the Literary Draft in Europe

Author: Olga Beloborodova
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027246580
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 566

Book Description
Literary drafts are a constant in literatures of all ages and linguistic areas, and yet their role in writing processes in various traditions has seldom been the subject of systematic comparative scrutiny. In 38 chapters written by leading experts in many different fields, this book charts a comparative history of the literary draft in Europe and beyond. It is organised according to eight categories of comparison distributed over the volume’s two parts, devoted respectively to ‘Text’ (i.e. the textual aspects of creative processes) and ‘Beyond Text’ (i.e. aspects of creative processes that are not necessarily textual). Across geographical, temporal, linguistic, generic and media boundaries, to name but a few, this book uncovers idiosyncrasies and parallels in the surviving traces of human creativity while drawing the reader’s attention to the materiality of literary drafts and the ephemerality of the writing process they capture.

Edward Thomas: Prose Writings: a Selected Edition

Author: Edward Thomas
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198784341
Category : Poets, English
Languages : en
Pages : 806

Book Description
Edward Thomas can be seen as the most important poetry critic in the early twentieth century. Thomas was a prose-writer before he was a poet. The Selected Edition of his prose, and especially this volume, shows that he was also a critic before he was a poet. His unusual literary career opens up key questions about the relation between poetry and criticism, as well as between poetry and prose. Thomas wrote books about poetry, but his criticism mainly took the form of reviews. He reviewed collections, editions, and studies of poetry, most regularly, for the Daily Chronicle and the Morning Post. These reviews amount to a unique commentary on the state of poetry and of poetry criticism after 1900. Since reviewing provided Thomas's main income, he also reviewed other kinds of book. Hence the sheer mass of his reviews, the stress he suffered as a literary journalist. Yet his criticism maintains an astonishingly high standard. Thomas's response to contemporary poetry intersects with his readings of older poetry. No critic or poet of the time was so deeply acquainted with the traditions of English-language poetry or so alert to new poetic movements in Ireland and America. Edward Thomas's writings on poetry have a double importance. Besides suggesting the hidden evolution of his own aesthetic, they constitute a lost history and critique of poetry before the Great War. They change our assumptions about that period. Thomas's perspectives on poets such as Yeats, Hardy, Frost, Lawrence, and Pound illuminate the making of modern poetry.

International Who's Who in Poetry 2005

Author: Europa Publications
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135355193
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1787

Book Description
The 13th edition of the International Who's Who in Poetry is a unique and comprehensive guide to the leading lights and freshest talent in poetry today. Containing biographies of more than 4,000 contemporary poets world-wide, this essential reference work provides truly international coverage. In addition to the well known poets, talented up-and-coming writers are also profiled. Contents: * Each entry provides full career history and publication details * An international appendices section lists prizes and past prize-winners, organizations, magazines and publishers * A summary of poetic forms and rhyme schemes * The career profile section is supplemented by lists of Poets Laureate, Oxford University professors of poetry, poet winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, winners of the Pulitzer Prize for American Poetry and of the King's/Queen's Gold medal and other poetry prizes.

When Christmas Comes

Author: Anne Harvey
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0752494848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 143

Book Description
Anne Harvey recreates the magic and spirit of childhood Christmases through a collection of pieces of poetry, prose and illustration covering the past two centuries, reminding us of the excitement and anticipation felt by children at Christmas time. Their expectations and experiences at Christmas: the food and the presents, the preparation, the enigma of Father Christmas, the knobbly stocking, the magical tree, the sense of wonder as well as those moments of fear and disappointment, are all captured. Extracts from writers and artists including Quentin Blake, Alison Uttley, A.A Milne, and Tolkien vividly remember the excitement of hanging the stockings, making Christmas Puddings, singing carols, and decorating the tree.

Language, Truth, and Literature

Author: Richard Gaskin
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191633038
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 395

Book Description
According to the literary humanist, works of imaginative literature have an objective meaning which is fixed at the time of their production and which is the same for all readers, then and thereafter, not subject to the vagaries of individual readers' responses. Such works refer to the real world and make statements about that world which are of cognitive as well as aesthetic value; the two kinds of value are indeed intimately connected. Richard Gaskin offers a defence of literary humanism, so understood, against assault from two directions. On the one hand, some analytic aestheticians have argued that works of literature do not bear referentially on the world and do not make true statements about it; others hold that such works do not make a contribution to knowledge; others again allow that works of literature may have cognitive value, but deny that this depends on their having truth or reference. On the other hand, reception-theorists and deconstructionists have rejected the humanist's objectivist conception of literary meaning, and typically take a pragmatist and anti-realist approach to truth and meaning. This latter, poststructuralist treatment of literature has often been accompanied by a radical politicization of its study. In defending literary humanism against these various forms of attack, Gaskin shows that the reading and appreciation of literature is a cognitive activity fully on a par with scientific investigation, and that we can and should engage in it disinterestedly for the sake of what can be learnt about the world and our place in it.

Freelancing

Author: Hugo Williams
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571296947
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
In 1988 Hugo Williams began to pen his 'Freelance' column for the Times Literary Supplement: a window that allowed him to exhibit the full panoply of his gifts as travel writer, literary portraitist, working poet, and all-round chronicler of the curious existence of the contemporary writer. Freelancing is a collection of these TLS columns that finds Williams variously in Sarajevo, Central America, Jerusalem, Skyros, Portugal and Norwich. In the course of events he sees his Selected Poems published, his mother dies, his wife inherits a chateau and he crashes his motorbike. He reads and teaches, as most poets do, but also strolls through Paris dressed as Marlene Dietrich, encounters some of the great and good, and explores his personal history. His account of these adventures, reflections and discoveries is elegantly turned, frequently hilarious, and at times surprisingly poignant.