Authors: John Heath-Stubbs, A. T. Tolley, Trevor Tolley
ISBN-13: 9781857543520, ISBN-10: 1857543521
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Carcanet Press, Limited
Date Published: September 1998
Edition: (Non-applicable)
To mark John Heath-Stubbs's eightieth birthday, Carcanet publishes his major essays. The earliest was written in 1945, the most recent half a century later. There is a notable continuity of concern throughout the book: here is a poet undistracted by fashion from his vocation, which is to read deeply and to understand the different terms on which every writer wrestles poems from a language. He considers English poets from Spenser to the present day, as well as the Italians Tasso and Leopardi. In engaging a writer he employs his unique understanding of poetic process. He has a clear sense of the challenges and rewards of sustained long poems - epic, allegory or satire - and an ear for rhythmic and semantic nuance. Fascination with specific detail never distracts him from a sense of the larger project of the poem itself.
Acknowledgements | ||
Introduction | 1 | |
A Note on the Text | 10 | |
Related Reading | 11 | |
Dryden and the Heroic Ideal [1969] | 13 | |
Baroque Ceremony: A Study of Dryden's "Ode to the Memory of Mistress Anne Killigrew" (1686) [1959] | 33 | |
Swift [1948] | 40 | |
Pope [1964] | 44 | |
Gray [1983] | 55 | |
George Crabbe and the Eighteenth Century [1945] | 65 | |
Wordsworth and Tradition [1950] | 76 | |
Landor's Gebir [1984] | 83 | |
Shelley [1948] | 88 | |
Poe [1988] | 92 | |
Tennyson [1948] | 102 | |
Ezra Pound: The Last Humanist [1950] | 109 | |
Structure and Source in Eliot's Major Poetry [1985] | 116 | |
Daughters of Memory: The Anathemata of David Jones [1953] | 128 | |
Hart Crane [1947] | 134 | |
Charles Williams [1955] | 139 | |
Cecil Day Lewis: A Real Poet After All [1977] | 165 | |
W. H. Auden [1976] | 168 | |
William Bell [1950] | 172 | |
Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata as Christian Epic [1951] | 179 | |
Leopardi as Poetic Thinker [1966] | 195 | |
The Astrological Basis of Spenser's Shephearde's Calender [1989] | 203 |