The Cambridge History of English Poetry

by O'Neill, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780521883061
• ISBN10: 0521883067
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-06-30
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

Poetry written in English is uniquely powerful and suggestive in its capacity to surprise, unsettle, shock, console, and move. The Cambridge History of English Poetry offers sparklingly fresh and dynamic readings of an extraordinary range of poets and poems from Beowulf to Alice Oswald. An international team of experts explores how poets in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland use language and to what effect, examining questions of form, tone, and voice; they comment, too, on how formal choices are inflected by the poet's time and place. The Cambridge History of English Poetry is the most comprehensive and authoritative history of the field from early medieval times to the present. It traces patterns of continuity, transformation, transition, and development. Covering a remarkable array of poets and poems, and featuring an extensive bibliography, the scope and depth of this major work of reference make it required reading for anyone interested in poetry.

Author Biography

Michal O'Neill is Professor of English at Durham University. He has published widely on poetry and is a published poet himself. His recent publications include The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900 (2007) and the poetry collection Wheel (2008).

Table of Contents

Introduction

Old English poetry

The Gawain-poet and medieval romance

Late fourteenth-century poetry (Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and their legacy)

Langland: Piers Plowman

Chaucer - Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales

Late-medieval literature in Scotland: Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas

Sixteenth-century poetry: Skelton, Wyatt and Surrey

Spenser

Sidney, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan sonnet and lyric

The narrative poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare

Seventeenth-century poetry 1: poetry in the age of Donne and Jonson

Seventeenth-century poetry 2: Herbert, Vaughan, Philips, Cowley, Crashaw, Marvell

Milton's shorter poems

Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes

Restoration poetry: Behn, Dryden, Rochester, Samuel Butler, Oldham and Killigrew

Dryden: major poems

Swift

Poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century: Pope, Johnson and the couplet

Eighteenth-century women poets

Longer eighteenth-century poems (Akenside, Goldsmith, Thomson, Young, Cowper, and others)

Lyric poetry: 1740-1790

Romantic poetry: an overview

William Blake's poetry and prophecies

Wordsworth and Coleridge - Lyrical Ballads and other poems

Wordsworth's The Prelude and The Excursion

Second-generation Romantic poetry 1 (Hunt, Byron, Moore)

Byron's Don Juan

Second-generation Romantic poetry 2 (Shelley and Keats)

Third-generation Romantic poetry: Beddoes, Darley, Clare, Hemans, Landon

Women poets of the Romantic period (Barbauld to Landon)

Victorian poetry: an overview

Tennyson

Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Emily BrontÃ", Arnold, and Clough

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne

Christina Rossetti and Hopkins

Later Victorian voices 1 (James Thomson, Symons, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Housman)

Later Victorian voices 2: John Davidson, Rudyard Kipling, 'Michael Field' (Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Cooper)

Modernist and modern poetry: an overview

Hardy and Mew

Yeats

Imagism

T. S. Eliot

Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon, and Edward Thomas

Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender: the thirties poetry

Dylan Thomas and poetry of the 1940s

Larkin and the Movement

Three twentieth-century women poets: Laura Riding, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath

Hughes and Heaney

Hill Andrew

Mahon, Muldoon, McGuckian, Carson, Boland and other Irish poets

Contemporary poetries in English: c.1980 to the present 1 - the radical tradition

Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 2

Bibliography

Index

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