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 45
Page 5
... experiences. This book will track and account for the changes in plain En- glish over the last two hundred years; and it will also suggest why, for poets, plain English has remained so seductive. As the sequence of chapters suggests, my ...
... experiences. This book will track and account for the changes in plain En- glish over the last two hundred years; and it will also suggest why, for poets, plain English has remained so seductive. As the sequence of chapters suggests, my ...
Page 10
... experience . It is not my purpose to replace one genealogy with another , Keats supplanting Shelley as the Moderns ' most important direct " influence . " Rather , I suggest a kind of parallel evolution , in which the strategy of Keats ...
... experience . It is not my purpose to replace one genealogy with another , Keats supplanting Shelley as the Moderns ' most important direct " influence . " Rather , I suggest a kind of parallel evolution , in which the strategy of Keats ...
Page 11
... experience. My last chapter, instead of focusing on either of these poets, returns to En- gland and W. H. Auden, who offers a third and to my mind more compelling possibility: the poet of consciousness as propagandist. A poetry of ...
... experience. My last chapter, instead of focusing on either of these poets, returns to En- gland and W. H. Auden, who offers a third and to my mind more compelling possibility: the poet of consciousness as propagandist. A poetry of ...
Page 21
... experience ? To make matters worse , Locke is unwavering in his conventional- ism : reacting in part against contemporary theories of natural discourse , he in- sists , with as much conviction as Saussure , that the relation of words to ...
... experience ? To make matters worse , Locke is unwavering in his conventional- ism : reacting in part against contemporary theories of natural discourse , he in- sists , with as much conviction as Saussure , that the relation of words to ...
Page 24
... experience, he grants the mind considerable leverage in their subsequent cre- ation. The mind receives passively from the senses simple ideas: discreet, partic- ular impressions (for example, red, sharp, loud), which it “can neither ...
... experience, he grants the mind considerable leverage in their subsequent cre- ation. The mind receives passively from the senses simple ideas: discreet, partic- ular impressions (for example, red, sharp, loud), which it “can neither ...
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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Common terms and phrases
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