Power, Plain English, and the Rise of Modern PoetryDIVIn this engaging book David Rosen offers a radically new account of Modern poetry and revises our understanding of its relation to Romanticism. British poets from Wordsworth to Auden attempted to present themselves simultaneously as persons of power and as moral voices in their communities. The modern lyric derives its characteristic complexities—psychological, ethical, formal—from the extraordinary difficulty of this effort. The low register of our language—a register of short, concrete, native words arranged in simple syntax—is deeply implicated in this story. Rosen shows how the peculiar reputation of “plain English” for truthfulness is employed by Modern poets to conceal the rift between their (probably irreconcilable) ambitions for themselves. With a deep appreciation for poetic accomplishment and a wonderful iconoclasm, Rosen sheds new light on the innovative as well as the self-deceptive aspects of Modern poetry. This book alters our understanding of the history of poetry in the English language./div |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 26
Page 4
... find it hard to deceive either your- self or others : " [ I have been considering ] language as an instrument for express- ing and not for concealing or preventing thought . If you simplify your En- glish , you are freed from the worst ...
... find it hard to deceive either your- self or others : " [ I have been considering ] language as an instrument for express- ing and not for concealing or preventing thought . If you simplify your En- glish , you are freed from the worst ...
Page 7
... find favor do so for the wrong reasons . 14 This questionable understanding of Romanticism ( which I will expand on shortly ) is visible also in the second school of critics , those whose only response to the last stanza of “ Coole and ...
... find favor do so for the wrong reasons . 14 This questionable understanding of Romanticism ( which I will expand on shortly ) is visible also in the second school of critics , those whose only response to the last stanza of “ Coole and ...
Page 11
... find some (as we shall see, rather ambivalent) resolution in Auden. With Auden, too, my history of plain English is brought to a close. If Wordsworth's legacy to the twentieth century is a low register with a reputation for truthfulness ...
... find some (as we shall see, rather ambivalent) resolution in Auden. With Auden, too, my history of plain English is brought to a close. If Wordsworth's legacy to the twentieth century is a low register with a reputation for truthfulness ...
Page 21
... find they should both think amiss of things in themselves , and talk of them unintelligibly to others ” ( II.32.8 ) . Since words signify ideas arbitrarily , and ideas are often the unreliable signs of things , one suspects that Locke ...
... find they should both think amiss of things in themselves , and talk of them unintelligibly to others ” ( II.32.8 ) . Since words signify ideas arbitrarily , and ideas are often the unreliable signs of things , one suspects that Locke ...
Page 34
... find Wordsworth first using the plain , low register of English in a way that I take to be characteristic of his mature output . The low register is not in itself new to him : his truly juvenile , initial attempts at verse writing ...
... find Wordsworth first using the plain , low register of English in a way that I take to be characteristic of his mature output . The low register is not in itself new to him : his truly juvenile , initial attempts at verse writing ...
Contents
1 | |
15 | |
33 | |
Certain Good W B Yeats and the Language of Autobiography | 73 |
The Lost Youth of Modern Poetry T S Eliot W H Auden | 123 |
Notes | 181 |
Index | 201 |
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argument autobiography beauty Beggar begins Book Cambridge career century chapter claims Cold Heaven Coleridge crisis critics culture decade diction early Essays experience feelings finally Freud Green Helmet Harold Bloom human identity idiom imagination Jarrell John John Keats Juvenilia XVIa Katherine Bucknell Keats kind landscape language late later Latinate lines Locke Locke's low register lyric M. H. Abrams mature Maud Gonne meaning memory metaphor mind modern poetry Modernist myth nature object Orwell passage perhaps period philosophical plain English poem poet poet’s poetic political Prelude prose psychology Randall Jarrell reality recognize rhetoric Romantic Romanticism seems sense Shelley simple ideas social speaker stanza style suggest T. S. Eliot theory things thought Tintern Abbey tion tradition truth turn understanding University Press verse verse paragraph vision visionary voice W. B. Yeats W. H. Auden Watershed William Wordsworth words Wordsworthian writing Yeats's York