C. Day-Lewis: The Golden Bridle Selected Prose

by Gelpi, Albert; O'Donoghue, Bernard

• ISBN13: 9780198766117
• ISBN10: 0198766114
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2017-11-28
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

C. Day-Lewis was a major figure in British poetry and culture from the 1930s until his death in 1972. The Golden Bridle: Selected Prose takes its title from the myth of Bellerophon and the golden bridle of Pegasus, which Day-Lewis invoked on several occasions as a metaphor for the creative process. Day-Lewis as poet is, then, the organizing idea of this anthology, and the selections indicate the scope and range of his vital engagement with English life and letters.

Organised into four parts, the volume illustrates Day-Lewis's reflections on the role and function of poetry in society and culture; the creative process and the workings of the imagination as well as the nature of poetic truth and its relation to science; poets who were of particular importance to Day-Lewis; and the poetic process in relation to the composition of several of his own poems. The notes indicate the particular source, circumstances, and central issues of each piece, to provide a brief intellectual biography and critical account of this eminent poet's development and standing.

Author Biography

Albert Gelpi, William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature, Emeritus, Stanford University,Bernard O'Donoghue, Emeritus Fellow in English, Wadham College, University of Oxford

Albert Gelpi is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature, emeritus at Stanford University. He is author of Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet (1965) and The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet (1975) and editor of The Poet in America: 1650 to the Present, Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism, Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism, The Blood of the Poet: Selected Poems of William Everson, and Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose. He was founding editor of Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, and has served as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, Chairman of the American Studies Program, and Chairman of the English Department. Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis was published in 1998. With Robert Bertholf he edited The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov (2004) and the collection of essays, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov: The Poetry of Politics, the Politics of Poetry (2006).



Bernard O'Donoghue is an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, where he taught Medieval English and Modern Irish Poetry. He has published six collections of poetry, including Gunpowder, winner of the 1995 Whitbread Prize for Poetry, and Farmers Cross (2011) which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize. His Selected Poems was published by Faber in 2008. He has published a verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Penguin Classics 2006), and his most recent volume The Seasons of Cullen Church was published by Faber in 2016.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Poerty, Politics, and Society
Preface to Oxford Poetry 1927 (with W. H. Auden)
from A Hope for Poetry (1934)
'Revolutionaries and Poetry'(1935)
from 'The Poet's Task' (1951)
Poetry and Poetics
from The Poetic Image (1947)
'The Colloquial Element in English Poetry' (1947)
'The Poet's Way of Knowledge' (1956)
from The Lyric Impulse (1965)
Poets
'Gerard Manley Hopkins' (1934)
'Introduction' to George Meredith's Modern Love (1948)
'The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy' (1951)
'Introduction' to Robert Frost's Selected Poems (1955)
'Introduction' to Wilfred Owen's Collected Poems (1963)
Autobiographical Reflections
from The Buried Day (1960)
from 'Making a Poem' (mid-1960s)
from 'The Golden Bridle' (1965)
from 'On Translating Poetry' (1969)
'Foreword' to Selected Poems (1967)