The Cambridge History of English Poetry

Cambridge University Press, 4/29/2010
EAN 9780521883061, ISBN10: 0521883067

Hardcover, 1115 pages, 22.9 x 15.5 x 5.8 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English

Poetry written in English is uniquely powerful and suggestive in its capacity to surprise, unsettle, shock, console, and move. The Cambridge History of English Poetry offers sparklingly fresh and dynamic readings of an extraordinary range of poets and poems from Beowulf to Alice Oswald. An international team of experts explores how poets in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland use language and to what effect, examining questions of form, tone, and voice; they comment, too, on how formal choices are inflected by the poet's time and place. The Cambridge History of English Poetry is the most comprehensive and authoritative history of the field from early medieval times to the present. It traces patterns of continuity, transformation, transition, and development. Covering a remarkable array of poets and poems, and featuring an extensive bibliography, the scope and depth of this major work of reference make it required reading for anyone interested in poetry.

Introduction Michael O'Neill
1. Old English poetry Bernard O'Donoghue
2. The Gawain-poet and medieval romance Corinne Saunders
3. Late fourteenth-century poetry (Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and their legacy) Wendy Scase
4. Langland
Piers Plowman A. V. C. Schmidt
5. Chaucer - Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales Laura Varnam
6. Late-medieval literature in Scotland
Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas Felicity Riddy
7. Sixteenth-century poetry
Skelton, Wyatt and Surrey Elizabeth Heale
8. Spenser Andrew Hadfield
9. Sidney, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan sonnet and lyric Katharine A. Craik
10. The narrative poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare Paul Edmondson
11. Seventeenth-century poetry 1
poetry in the age of Donne and Jonson Jonathan Post
12. Seventeenth-century poetry 2
Herbert, Vaughan, Philips, Cowley, Crashaw, Marvell Alison Shell
13. Milton's shorter poems Barbara K. Lewalski
14. Milton
Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes Barbara K. Lewalski
15. Aphra Behn, John Dryden and their contemporaries Hester Jones
16. Dryden
major poems Steven N. Zwicker
17. Swift Claude Rawson
18. Poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century
Pope, Johnson and the couplet Claude Rawson
19. Eighteenth-century women poets Christine Gerrard
20. Longer eighteenth-century poems (Akenside, Goldsmith, Thomson, Young, Cowper, and others) Richard Terry
21. Lyric poetry
1740–90 David Fairer
22. Romantic poetry
an overview Seamus Perry
23. William Blake's poetry and prophecies John Beer
24. Wordsworth and Coleridge - Lyrical Ballads and other poems Timothy Webb
25. Wordsworth's The Prelude and The Excursion Alison Hickey
26. Second-generation Romantic poetry 1 (Hunt, Byron, Moore) Jane Stabler
27. Byron's Don Juan Bernard Beatty
28. Second-generation Romantic poetry 2 (Shelley and Keats) Michael O'Neill
29. Third-generation Romantic poetry
Beddoes, Darley, Clare, Hemans, Landon Michael Bradshaw
30. Women poets of the Romantic period (Barbauld to Landon) Heidi Thomson
31. Victorian poetry
an overview Richard Cronin
32. Tennyson Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
33. Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning Herbert Tucker
34. Emily Brontë, Arnold, and Clough Michael O'Neill
35. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne David G. Riede
36. Christina Rossetti and Hopkins Catherine Phillips
37. Later Victorian voices 1 (James Thomson, Symons, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Housman) Nicholas Shrimpton
38. Later Victorian voices 2
John Davidson, Rudyard Kipling, 'Michael Field' (Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Cooper), Eugene Lee-Hamilton, May Kendall, Augusta Webster Francis O'Gorman
39. Modernist and modern poetry
an overview Jason Harding
40. Hardy and Mew Ralph Pite
41. Yeats Peter Vassallo
42. Imagism Vincent Sherry
43. T. S. Eliot Gareth Reeves
44. Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon, and Edward Thomas Mark Rawlinson
45. Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender
the thirties poetry Michael O'Neill
46. Dylan Thomas and poetry of the 1940s John Goodby
47. Larkin and the Movement Stephen Regan
48. Three twentieth-century women poets
Laura Riding, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath Alice Entwistle
49. Hughes and Heaney Edward Larrissy
50. Hill Andrew Michael Roberts
51. Mahon, Muldoon, McGuckian, Carson, Boland and other Irish poets Stephen Regan
52. Contemporary poetries in English
c.1980 to the present 1 - the radical tradition Peter Barry
53. Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 2 Jamie McKendrick
Bibliography
Index.

'This book provides an excellent introduction to English poetry but its most productive use will be as a catalyst for further reading.' Annotated Bibliography of English Studies