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 |
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Page 8
... myth that lo- cates (or quarantines) his direct, obliterating encounters with nature in the deep past, the world of his childhood, while leaving his adult self intact. Language, the low register, is used to conceal the space between ...
... myth that lo- cates (or quarantines) his direct, obliterating encounters with nature in the deep past, the world of his childhood, while leaving his adult self intact. Language, the low register, is used to conceal the space between ...
Page 31
... myth of development; so, too, does the idiom he correlates with that period. To the discomfort of his Modernist successors, he finally calls that breach “imagination.” The language of Wordsworth's imagination, in turn, is plain English ...
... myth of development; so, too, does the idiom he correlates with that period. To the discomfort of his Modernist successors, he finally calls that breach “imagination.” The language of Wordsworth's imagination, in turn, is plain English ...
Page 33
... mythology or fabricating a new one , this was the special task and mission of Wordsworth . " Even Hans Aarsleff , who would trace the Wordsworthian imagination back to Locke , is forced , I think , both to misrepresent Wordsworth's ...
... mythology or fabricating a new one , this was the special task and mission of Wordsworth . " Even Hans Aarsleff , who would trace the Wordsworthian imagination back to Locke , is forced , I think , both to misrepresent Wordsworth's ...
Page 46
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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