Strange Likeness The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry

by Jones, Chris

• ISBN13: 9780199577422
• ISBN10: 0199577420
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-12-09
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Strange Likenessprovides the first full account of how Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) was rediscovered by twentieth-century poets, and the uses to which they put that discovery in their own writing. Chapters deal with Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Edwin Morgan, and Seamus Heaney. Stylistic debts to Old English are examined, along with the effects on these poets' work of specific ideas about Old English language and literature as taught while these poets were studying the subject at university. Issues such as linguistic primitivism, the supposed 'purity' of the English language, the politics and ethics of translation, and the construction of 'Englishness' within the literary canon are discussed in the light of these poets and their Old English encounters. Heaney's translation ofBeowulfis fully contextualized within the body of the rest of his work for the first time.

Author Biography

Chris Jones is Senior Lecturer in Poetry at the University of St Andrews.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations	p. x
Introduction: Whose Poetry is Old English Anyway?	p. 1
'Ear for the sea-surge': Pound's Uses of Old English	p. 17
Anglo-Sexon Anxieties: Auden and 'the Barbaric Poetry of the North'	p. 68
Edwin Morgan: Dredging the Whale-Roads	p. 122
Old English Escape Routes: Seamus Heaney-the Caedmon of The North	p. 182
Conclusion: Old English-A Shadow Poetry?	p. 238
Appendix on Old English Metre	p. 245
Bibliography	p. 247
Index	p. 261
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