The Poetry of Clare, Hopkins, Thomas, and Gurney: Lyric Individualism

ISBN-13: 9783030309701 / Angielski / Twarda / 2020 / 337 str.

Andrew Hodgson

Spis treści

Introduction: Lyric Individualism.- The Personal Voice in Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Standing Single.- Part I: John Clare: Striving to be Himself.- Clare I: ‘A Helplessness in the Language’.- Clare II: ‘Oddly Real and His Own’.- Part II: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Oddity and Obscurity.- Hopkins I: ‘Unlike Itself’.- Hopkins II: ‘To Seem the Stranger’.- Part III: Edward Thomas: A Personal Accent.- Thomas I: ‘Myriad-Minded Lyric’.- Thomas II: ‘Intimate Speech’.- Part IV:  Ivor Gurney: Unquiet Achings.- Gurney I: ‘The Light of Newness’.- Gurney II: ‘A Person Named Myself’.- Epilogue: Three Later Instances.

O autorze

Andrew Hodgson is Lecturer in Romanticism at the Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham, UK.

Blurb

Andrew Hodgson displays a fine attentiveness to the distinctive lyric voices of Clare, Hopkins, Edward Thomas, and Gurney, tracing the peculiar contours of their intensity, intimacy, and intricacy with a remarkable sensitivity, skill, and assurance. The subtle incisiveness of his close engagement with these poets is a continual delight.

– Jason Harding, Professor of English Literature, University of Durham, UK

 Andrew Hodgson’s beautifully-written study of Clare, Hopkins, Edward Thomas, and Gurney traces in the textures of their verse idiosyncrasies which announce the poet’s selfhood, while also trying for a rapprochement with the common tongue.

– Vidyan Ravinthiran, Associate Professor of English Literature, Harvard University, USA

 This book attends to four poets – John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Thomas, and Ivor Gurney – whose poems are remarkable for their personal directness and distinctiveness. It shows how their writing conveys a potently individual quality of feeling, perception, and experience: each poet responds with unusual commitment to the Romantic idea of art as personal expression. The book looks closely at the vitality and intricacy of the poets’ language, the personal candour of their subject matter, and their sense, obdurate but persuasive, of their own strangeness. As it traces the tact and imagination with which each of the four writers realises the possibilities of individualism in lyric, it affirms the vibrancy of their contributions to nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry.

Andrew Hodgson is Lecturer in Romanticism at the Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham, UK.