American and British Verse in the Twentieth Century: The Poetry that MattersWhy is it that almost no one can quote more than a few words from any American or British poet since (say) Robert Lowell or Philip Larkin? asks critic and poet Colin Falck. This volume is a critical history of 20th-century poetry as well as a study of what the author sees as the decline of that poetry during the century's last three decades. Basing his argument in the ideas of English and German romanticism, and developing further the claims of his Myth, Truth and Literature (1994), Colin Falck provides philosophically grounded discussions of such issues as the need for modern poetry to be a poetry of experience, the relationship between poetry and philosophy, the triumph of talk as modern poetry's prevailing diction, the effects on poetry of postmodernist self-consciousness, the centrality of despair to the modern lyric, the means by which modern poetry can validly engage with history, the place of nature and myth in the poetic imagination, and the revelatory power of rhythm, meter and the singing line. as Hardy, Yeats, Eliot and Stevens (and from some of their 19th-century precursors) all the way through to such acclaimed poets as Jorie Graham and Hugo Williams. His argument calls for a middlebrow revival in response to the highbrow deviation of modernism and the late-20th-century professionalization of poetry. It ends with an ambitious claim for poetry as an inscription of reality as part of an aesthetic fundamentalism which may be the true religion of the future. |
From inside the book
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Page 9
... philosophical uncertainties that a poet who approaches experience in this way is condemned to , and with more support from the culture around him he might have established the Romantic lyric as a central genre of American poetry ...
... philosophical uncertainties that a poet who approaches experience in this way is condemned to , and with more support from the culture around him he might have established the Romantic lyric as a central genre of American poetry ...
Page 201
... philosophical in any way that outreaches or leaves behind the immediate experience it relates to . None inflicts any pre - formulated system of beliefs on the reader . None is technically ostentatious or in - the - reader's - face in ...
... philosophical in any way that outreaches or leaves behind the immediate experience it relates to . None inflicts any pre - formulated system of beliefs on the reader . None is technically ostentatious or in - the - reader's - face in ...
Page 213
... philosophical truth about the nature of art and poetry . That this is how things are is something that artists and poets have always instinctively known , but it is also something that philosophy has more recently been able to prove for ...
... philosophical truth about the nature of art and poetry . That this is how things are is something that artists and poets have always instinctively known , but it is also something that philosophy has more recently been able to prove for ...
Common terms and phrases
A.E. Housman aesthetic altogether American poetry artists Ashbery become believe Blake British poetry called Cantos character Coleridge cultural D.H. Lawrence diction Eliot emotional English Essays experience experiencing experiential Faber feel free verse give happen Hardy Harmondsworth Housman human Ian Hamilton ideas imaginative interest Jeffers's Keats kind of poetry language Lawrence line-breaks lines literary literature lives London look Lowell's Lyrical Ballads matter meanings meter mind modern poetry modernist myth mythic nature ordinary ourselves Oxford particular Penguin perhaps Philip Larkin philosophical Plath poem's poems poet poet's poetic poetry's Pound Prufrock reader reality religion religious revealing rhythmic rhythms Robert Frost Robert Lowell Robinson Jeffers Romantic Romanticism seems sense sometimes Song speaker spiritual Stevens Sylvia Plath symbol T.S. Eliot things thought traditional trans truth twentieth century W.B. Yeats W.H. Auden Whitman William Carlos Williams Williams's words Wordsworth writing York