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 1
... psychological , ethical , formal- from the extraordinary difficulty , perhaps the futility , of this effort . The low register of our language , which I also call “ plain English , ” is deeply implicated in this story . Each of the ...
... psychological , ethical , formal- from the extraordinary difficulty , perhaps the futility , of this effort . The low register of our language , which I also call “ plain English , ” is deeply implicated in this story . Each of the ...
Page 8
... psychological 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 ...
... psychological 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 ...
Page 9
... psychology, his new way of claim- ing authority as a poet, produced equally innovative ideas about style and sub- ject matter. It is only to be expected, furthermore, that the poets immediately following him would respond vehemently to ...
... psychology, his new way of claim- ing authority as a poet, produced equally innovative ideas about style and sub- ject matter. It is only to be expected, furthermore, that the poets immediately following him would respond vehemently to ...
Page 10
... psychology , and to offer strategic responses to it ; not , it happens , Modernists like Frost and Hardy , who resembled Wordsworth in using the low register , but Yeats and Eliot , whose grasp of plain English showed a more subtle ...
... psychology , and to offer strategic responses to it ; not , it happens , Modernists like Frost and Hardy , who resembled Wordsworth in using the low register , but Yeats and Eliot , whose grasp of plain English showed a more subtle ...
Page 12
... psychology itself shifts from chapter to chapter. Wordsworth, in my account, is an intuitive psychologist, the inventor of a way to understand personal history. Yeats and Eliot are both loud despisers of psychology in its modern ...
... psychology itself shifts from chapter to chapter. Wordsworth, in my account, is an intuitive psychologist, the inventor of a way to understand personal history. Yeats and Eliot are both loud despisers of psychology in its modern ...
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