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 73
Page 2
... mind is scarcely less troubled . Here , Lear , having been led to shelter by Kent , has just encountered Edgar , whom he takes to be a deranged beggar . Where his heightened language in pre- vious scenes had vividly reflected his own ...
... mind is scarcely less troubled . Here , Lear , having been led to shelter by Kent , has just encountered Edgar , whom he takes to be a deranged beggar . Where his heightened language in pre- vious scenes had vividly reflected his own ...
Page 3
David Rosen. Lear's mind seems, abruptly, to clear; in Edgar he seems to perceive, in a most direct way, what Yeats would later call the desolation of reality. One almost senses in Shakespeare's shift an intuition, far transcending ...
David Rosen. Lear's mind seems, abruptly, to clear; in Edgar he seems to perceive, in a most direct way, what Yeats would later call the desolation of reality. One almost senses in Shakespeare's shift an intuition, far transcending ...
Page 6
... mind of man or elevate a rhyme; But all is changed, that high horse riderless, Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood. (41, 44–48) In these lines, Yeats is discerning a sharp break between ...
... mind of man or elevate a rhyme; But all is changed, that high horse riderless, Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood. (41, 44–48) In these lines, Yeats is discerning a sharp break between ...
Page 11
... mind more compelling possibility: the poet of consciousness as propagandist. A poetry of conscious- ness, lacking a strong inner reason for being, is particularly susceptible to the se- ductions of external Authority. The tensions ...
... mind more compelling possibility: the poet of consciousness as propagandist. A poetry of conscious- ness, lacking a strong inner reason for being, is particularly susceptible to the se- ductions of external Authority. The tensions ...
Page 13
... mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own . Even the most extreme con- sciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter . Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the ...
... mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own . Even the most extreme con- sciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter . Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the ...
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