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...

The last century was characterised by an extraordinary flowering of the art of poetry in Britain. These specially commissioned essays by some of the most highly regarded poetry critics offer a stimulating and reliable overview of English poetry of the twentieth century. The opening section on contexts will both orientate readers relatively new to the field and provide provocative syntheses for those already familiar with it. Following the terms introduced by this section, individual chapters cover many ways of looking at the 'modern', the 'modernist' and the 'postmodern'. The core of the...

Neil Corcoran's new book considers the kinds of responsibility which some exemplary modern lyric poetry takes on, or to which it makes itself subject - social, cultural, political, aesthetic and personal. It treats its theme in British, Irish and American poets and in some influential foreign-language poets available in influential English translations.
The book discusses the poetry of the First World War and the Cold War in such poets as Owen, Rosenberg, Pasternak, Zbigniew Herbert and Robert Lowell; the poetry and politics of modern Ireland in Yeats, MacNeice, Heaney and others; and...