RE:Verse: Turning Towards Poetry

by **NFA**; Jeremy

• ISBN13: 9781405836166
• ISBN10: 1405836164
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2007-07-19
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

RE: Verse is an introduction to reading poetry. It combines close reading and practical criticism in a series of suggestive master classes that illuminate what poetry can be and, crucially, how it can be better understood. It is suitable for all readers of poetry, from those studying at school or university, to those who simply wish to develop their own personal understanding.

Author Biography

Jeremy Tambling is currently Professor of Literature at the University of Manchester, having previously been Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He has written widely on many aspects of literature, including most recently Blake's Night Thoughts (2004) and Becoming Posthumous (2001), which The Guardian hailed as 'a delicate dismantling of what we thought the past was for'. He is currently working on a major study of Dickens and London.

Table of Contents

To the Reader	p. xi
Acknowledgements	p. xv
Publisher's Acknowledgements	p. xvi
Introduction: listening to poetry	p. 1
Blake: 'London'	p. 2
Wordsworth: 'Westminster Bridge'	p. 6
Eliot: The Waste Land	p. 10
Shakespeare and song	p. 14
Five ideas for reading	p. 20
Dramatic voice	p. 20
Tone	p. 29
Ambiguity	p. 35
How rhythm affects sense	p. 42
Imagery	p. 45
Making poetry: making meanings	p. 52
Poetry and the social world	p. 53
Medieval and Renaissance poetry	p. 57
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight	p. 57
Wyatt: 'They fle from me'	p. 61
Poetry in the Age of Reason	p. 63
Dryden: Absolom and Achitophel	p. 63
Pope: Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot	p. 68
Gray: 'On Lord Holland's Seat near Margate, Kent'	p. 70
Johnson: 'On the Death of Dr Robert Levet'	p. 72
Towards Romantic poetry	p. 76
Shelley: The Triumph of Life	p. 77
Public and private poetry	p. 85
Two Victorians	p. 85
Rossetti: 'Remember'	p. 85
Tennyson: 'Tithonus'	p. 87
Twentieth-century poetry: four examples	p. 92
Hardy: 'After a Journey'	p. 92
Yeats: 'Easter 1916'	p. 96
Auden: 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats'	p. 101
Lowell: 'Waking Early Sunday Morning'	p. 102
Why is poetry difficult?	p. 109
Three seventeenth-century writers	p. 111
Middleton: The Revenger's Tragedy	p. 111
Shakespeare: Macbeth	p. 114
Donne: 'A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucie's Day'	p. 118
Three Romantics	p. 124
Wordsworth: 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal'	p. 124
Coleridge: 'Kubla Khan'	p. 126
Keats: The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream	p. 130
Baudelaire: 'A une passante'	p. 133
'Poetry is the subject of the poem'	p. 137
Poetry and enchantment	p. 137
Carroll: 'Jabberwocky'	p. 140
Modernism	p. 144
Mallarme: 'Ses purs ongles'	p. 144
Yeats: 'Sailing to Byzantium'	p. 149
Stevens: 'The Man with the Blue Guitar'	p. 152
Stevens: 'Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction'	p. 154
Mallarme: 'A la nue accablante tu'	p. 159
Modernism and postmodernism in poetry	p. 163
Poetry and translation	p. 167
Petrarch in English	p. 167
Milton: Lycidas	p. 171
Modern translation: Ezra Pound	p. 176
Heaney: Beowulf	p. 182
Translation as critique	p. 187
Translation and verse styles	p. 191
Reading modern poetry	p. 194
Postcolonial poetry	p. 197
Women's poetry	p. 202
Postcolonial and 'Queer' poetry	p. 208
Poetry and trauma	p. 211
Technical terms and phrases	p. 220
Two passages	p. 220
Rhythm	p. 225
Rhyme	p. 231
Metaphor, symbolism and allegory	p. 233
Some final definitions	p. 236
Further reading	p. 238
Bibliography	p. 248
Questions for further study	p. 253
Poetry examples	p. 256
Index	p. 259
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