Here is a treasure-house of over seven centuries of English poetry, chosen and introduced by Christopher Ricks, whom Auden described as "exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding." The Oxford Book of English Verse, created in 1900 by Arthur Quiller-Couch and selected anew in 1972 by Helen Gardner, has established itself as the foremost anthology of English poetry: ample in span, liberal in the kinds of poetry presented. This completely fresh selection brings in new poems and poets from all ages, and extends the range by another half-century, to include many...
Here is a treasure-house of over seven centuries of English poetry, chosen and introduced by Christopher Ricks, whom Auden described as "exactly the k...
Most people want to live forever. But there is another truth: the longing for oblivion. With pain, wit, and humor, the art of Samuel Beckett variously embodies this truth, this ancient enduring belief that it is better to be dead than alive, best of all never to have been born. Beckett is the supreme writer of an age which has created new possibilities and impossibilities even in the matter of death and its definition--an age of transplants and life-support. But how does a writer give life to dismay at life itself, to the not unwelcome encroachments of death, when it is for the life, the...
Most people want to live forever. But there is another truth: the longing for oblivion. With pain, wit, and humor, the art of Samuel Beckett variously...
Christopher Ricks is one of the best-known living critics of English, and was described by W. H. Auden as "the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding." Though published independently over many years, each of the essays in this collection asks how a poet's words reveal the "force of poetry," that force--in Dr Johnson's words--"which calls new power into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter." The poets covered range from John Gower, Marvell, and Milton to Wordsworth, Empson, Stevie Smith, Lowell, and Larkin, and the book contains four wider essays on cliches, lies,...
Christopher Ricks is one of the best-known living critics of English, and was described by W. H. Auden as "the kind of critic every poet dreams of fin...
A great age of poetry speaks for itself in Christopher Ricks's celebrated anthology: the variety and power of Victorian verse, the innovation and creativity with which poets resisted the bad propensities of the era through which they lived. The great figures are of course strongly represented --Tennyson and Browning, Swinburne and Hopkins--but not so as to crowd out the less expected but equally rewarding facets of light verse and nonsense, of grotesque and protest. At long last justice is done to the poignant directness of "the true voice of feeling," from William Barnes and John Clare,...
A great age of poetry speaks for itself in Christopher Ricks's celebrated anthology: the variety and power of Victorian verse, the innovation and crea...
True Friendship looks closely at three outstanding poets of the past half-century--Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell--through the lens of their relation to their two predecessors in genius, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The critical attention then finds itself reciprocated, with Eliot and Pound being in their turn contemplated anew through the lenses of their successors. Hill, Hecht, and Lowell are among the most generously alert and discriminating readers, as is borne out not only by their critical prose but (best of all) by their acts of new creation, those poems of...
True Friendship looks closely at three outstanding poets of the past half-century--Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell--through ...
This is the only fully annotated and comprehensive selection of Tennyson s poetry. Acknowledged as a major achievement of editorial scholarship, it has established itself as the standard edition of Tennyson.
The collection contains in full all four of Tennyson's long poems: The Princess, In Memoriam, Maud, and Idylls of the King. Other key works are included from Mariana, The Lady of Shallott, Morte d'Arthur, Ulysses, and Tithonus through Tennyson's middle life and the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, to his last years and...
This is the only fully annotated and comprehensive selection of Tennyson s poetry. Acknowledged as a major achievement of editorial scholarship, it...
This is the only fully annotated and comprehensive selection of Tennyson s poetry. Acknowledged as a major achievement of editorial scholarship, it has established itself as the standard edition of Tennyson.
The collection contains in full all four of Tennyson's long poems: The Princess, In Memoriam, Maud, and Idylls of the King. Other key works are included from Mariana, The Lady of Shallott, Morte d'Arthur, Ulysses, and Tithonus through Tennyson's middle life and the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, to his last years and...
This is the only fully annotated and comprehensive selection of Tennyson s poetry. Acknowledged as a major achievement of editorial scholarship, it...