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Shakespeare and the Modern Poet

Shakespeare and the Modern Poet

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Neil Corcoran
Cambridge University Press, 4/1/2010
EAN 9780521199827, ISBN10: 0521199824

Hardcover, 254 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm
Language: English

Shakespeare is a major influence on poets writing in English, but the dynamics of that influence in the twentieth century have never been as closely analysed as they are in this important study. More than an account of the ways in which Shakespeare is figured in both the poetry and the critical prose of modern poets, this book presents a provocative new view of poetic interrelationship. Focusing on W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Neil Corcoran uncovers the relationships - combative as well as sympathetic - between these poets themselves as they are intertwined in their engagements with Shakespeare. Corcoran offers many enlightening close readings, fully alert to contemporary theoretical debates. This original study of influence and reception beautifully displays the nature of poetic influence - both of Shakespeare on the twentieth century, and among modern poets as they respond to Shakespeare.

Introduction
Part I. Yeats's Shakespeare
1. Setting a sail for shipwreck
Yeats's Shakespeare criticism
2. Myself must I remake
Shakespeare in Yeats's poetry
Part II. Eliot's Shakespeare
3. That man's scope
Eliot's Shakespeare criticism
4. This man's gift
Shakespeare in Eliot's poetry
Part III. Auden's Shakespeare
5. A plenum of experience
Auden's Shakespeare criticism
6. The reality of the mirror
Shakespeare in Auden's poetry
Part IV. Ted Hughes's Shakespeare
7. A language of the common bond
8. The Shakespearean moment
9. Survivor of cease
Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath in Ted Hughes's poems.

'This book is an outstanding achievement, full of brilliant readings of both important careers and individual poems, and written in a lucid, acute and witty style. It is both accessible to the undergraduate and informative for the expert. It is deeply sympathetic with its subjects, and yet always judicious and cold-eyed in its appraisals. It is the work of a critic writing at the height of his powers.' Justin Quinn, Charles University, Prague