Under Briggflatts

Author: Donald Davie
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226137568
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Book Description
Under Briggflatts is a history of the last thirty years of British poetry with necessary excursions into other areas: criticism, philosophy, translation, and non-British English poetries. It has grown naturally out of Donald Davie's immediate involvement with new writing as a poet, reviewer, teacher, and reader. He has reassessed the writers who have most engaged his attention, revised his reviews, and supplemented earlier material with much that is new. Under Briggflatts provides a narrative that is remarkable in scope and generous in tone. By combining close readings of specific poems and more general considerations of style, form, and context, Davie's account is characteristically elegant, precise, and uncompromising. Under Briggflatts is organized in three large chapters, one devoted to each decade. In the 1960s, Davie pays particular attention to the work of Austin Clarke, Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman McCaig, Keith Douglas, Edwin Muir, Basil Bunting (the gurus whose prose writings helped catalyze the traumatic events of 1968), Elaine Feinstein, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Philip Larkin, Charles Tomlinson, Thomas Kinsella, and Ted Hughes. The second chapter follows these figures into the new decade and explores the work of (among others) Thom Gunn, C. H. Sisson, R. S. Thomas, John Betjeman, and such themes as women's poetry, translation, poetic theory, and the later impact of T. S. Eliot and of Edward Thomas. Perhaps the most controversial chapter is the third, in which David—without abandoning the poets already introduced—assesses Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, and Seamus Heaney, and looks too at the recovery of Ivor Gurney's poems, at Ted Hughes as Laureate, the posthumous work of Sylvia Townsend Warner, the burgeoning Hardy industry, and the critical writings of Kenneth Cox.

Complete Poems

Author: Basil Bunting
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811215633
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
At last in print, the complete poems of the great Northumbrian poet--admired by Pound, Yeats, and Zukofsky--containing his masterwork Briggflatts.

The Forms of Youth

Author: Stephen Burt
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231141424
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
"Early in the twentieth century, Americans and other English-speaking nations began to regard adolescence as a separate phase of life. Associated with uncertainty, inwardness, instability, and sexual energy, adolescence acquired its own tastes, habits, subcultures, slang, economic interests, and art forms." "The first comprehensive study of adolescence in twentieth-century poetry, The Forms of Youth recasts the history of how English-speaking cultures began to view this phase of life as a valuable state of consciousness, if not the very essence of a Western identity."--BOOK JACKET.

Basil Bunting on Poetry

Author: Peter Makin
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9780801877506
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"All you can usually say about a poem or a picture is, 'Look at it, listen to it.' Whether you listen to a piece of music or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own."—Basil Bunting A close poetic ally of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, the British poet Basil Bunting is best known for his use of specific musical form in poetry. Several of his works, including his long poem Briggflatts, are in the form of the sonata. Although his language is plain, unvarnished English, his influences and models extend to Classical, Persian, and Japanese verse. Basil Bunting on Poetry collects two series of lectures that Bunting delivered in 1968 and 1974. Tracing the development of an English poetry governed by families of stress-groups from Beowulf down to Wyatt, Wordsworth, Whitman, Pound, and Zukofsky, the lectures focus on writing and hearing poetry rather than on literary-historical concerns. Throughout, editor Peter Makin expands upon and annotates the lectures with additional comments drawn from Bunting's writings.

Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination

Author: David Clark
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843842513
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
The Anglo-Saxon world continues to be a source of fascination in modern culture. Its manifestations in a variety of media are here examined.

Nations of Nothing But Poetry

Author: Matthew Hart
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199741611
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Book Description
Modernism is typically associated with novelty and urbanity. So what happens when poets identify small communities and local languages with the spirit of transnational modernity? Are vernacular poetries inherently provincial or implicitly xenophobic? How did modernist poets use vernacular language to re-imagine the relations between people, their languages, and the communities in which they live? Nations of Nothing But Poetry answers these questions through case studies of British, Caribbean, and American poetries from the 1920s through the 1990s. With a combination of fresh insights and attentive close readings, Matthew Hart presents a new theory of a "synthetic vernacular"-writing that explores the aesthetic and ideological tensions within modernism's dual commitments to the local and the global. The result is an invigorating contribution to the field of transnational modernist studies. Chapters focus on a mixture of canonical and non-canonical writers, combining new literary histories--such as the story of how Melvin B. Tolson, while a resident of Oklahoma, was appointed Poet Laureate of Liberia--with analyses of poems by Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. More broadly, the book reveals how the language of modernist poetry was shaped by the incompletely globalized nature of a world in which the nation-state continued to be a primary mediator of cultural and political identity, even as its authority was challenged as never before. Through deft juxtaposition, Hart develops a new interpretation of modernist poetry in English-one that disrupts the critical opposition between nationalism and the transnational, paving the way for a political history of modernist cosmopolitanism.

Fishing by Obstinate Isles

Author: Keith Tuma
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810116238
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Book Description
This text investigates modern British poetry and the death of that poetry in American critical circles. It explores the relations of British and American poetries, challenging reductive American views of British poetry.

Bakhtin and the Social Moorings of Poetry

Author: Donald Wesling
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838755402
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
"This book rescues Bakhtin from his overstatements concerning poetry, and gives the theoretical and practical basis for reading poems with the help of Bakhtin's categories of utterance, heteroglossia, and dialogue. In addition, through this rescue, the book offers a modest but strong foundation for a reading of poetry, and indeed of all literary texts, where a clash of social positions is fought out on the territory of the utterance. To find a believable poetics of social forms is the order of the day, and Donald Wesling's admiring and yet skeptical revision of Bakhtin will be part of the explanation we need."--Jacket.

The Poetry of Basil Bunting

Author: Victoria Forde
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
Basil Bunting did not 'believe in biography'. He used to assert that his great poem Briggflatts was his autobiography, and that nothing else was worth saying. He had scant respect for critics, and gave little away about his life - or misled his would-be biographers, whose accounts of him were often semi-mythical. But Bunting's real life does read like an adventure story. Born in Northumberland in 1900, he lived in Paris in the twenties, where Ezra Pound rescued him from jail and fixed him up with a job on the Transatlantic Review. In 1923 he followed Pound to Italy - giving up his job to Hemingway - where Yeats knew him as 'one of Pound's more savage disciples'. For the next thirty years he led a sometimes wild and always varied life, in Italy, England, Berlin, Tenerife, America and Persia, as a struggling, penniless writer, a music critic, sea captain, RAF officer, Times correspondent and Chief of Political Intelligence in Teheran. During these years he built up a reputation in America as the best English poet of his generation, at the same time as his poetry was neglected in Britain. It was not until the publication of Briggflatts in 1966 that his genius was finally recognised.He was in his seventies when he first met the American critic Sister Victoria Forde, who was working on a study of music and meaning in his poetry. They continued to meet and correspond, and his comments and answers to her letters now form an integral part of the book which grew out of her academic research. This is the first critical study of Bunting's poetry. It is a brilliantly researched book drawing upon the work and letters of Bunting and his contemporaries, as well as interviews and correspondence with his family, and includes over thirty previously unpublished photographs of and by Bunting taken throughout his life.

The Unaccompanied

Author: Simon Armitage
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1524732435
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 97

Book Description
From the prize-winning poet and former Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom comes a powerful collection of poetry that gives voice to the people of Britain with a haunting grace. We meet characters whose sense of isolation is both emotional and political, both real and metaphorical, from a son made to groom the garden hedge as punishment, to a nurse standing alone at a bus stop as the centuries pass by, to a latter-day Odysseus looking for enlightenment and hope in the shadowy underworld of a cut-price supermarket. We see the changing shape of England itself, viewed from a satellite "like a shipwreck's carcass raised on a sea-crane's hook, / nothing but keel, beams, spars, down to its bare bones." In this exquisite collection, Armitage X-rays the weary but ironic soul of his nation, with its "Songs about mills and mines and a great war, / lines about mermaids and solid gold hills, / songs from broken hymnbooks and cheesy films"—in poems that blend the lyrical and the vernacular, with his trademark eye for detail and biting wit.