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This volume brings together sixteen essays on British, Irish and American poets from the late nineteenth century to the present day. It offers a series of entertaining and compelling readings of the lives and works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.B. Yeats, Edward Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, James Schuyler, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Ted Hughes and Paul Muldoon among others.
Arranged chronologically, the essays present a wide-ranging and sophisticated narrative that takes the reader from the first stirrings of modernism through to the dynamic experiments of the present day. A number of essays attend to particular artistic alignments. One explores the relationship between Wallace Stevens and the unjustly neglected English poet Nicholas Moore, another the close friendship between James Schuyler and the painter Fairfield Porter, while a third contends that the lyrics, music and career of Bob Dylan unwittingly illustrate many of the key tenets of the great nineteenth-century essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson.
List of contents
Contents: Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland - Yeats and Form - Edward Thomas and World War I - Letters of Wallace Stevens - T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land - Hart Crane - Elizabeth Bishop and birds - Nicholas Moore and Wallace Stevens - James Schuyler and Fairfield Porter - Donald Justice - Allen Ginsberg and the Beats - John Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander - Letters of Ted Hughes - Joe Brainard - Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bob Dylan - Paul Muldoon.
About the author
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College London. He is the author of a critical biography of the French writer Raymond Roussel and the poetry collections Landlocked (1992), Soft Sift (2001) and Six Children (2011).
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«Here is the rich Anglo-American soil - the literary compost - that has nourished and supported Ford's poetry (...).» (Stephen Ross, Times Literary Supplement)
