The Story Of Poetry: Volume 3: From Pope To Burns

by Michael Schmidt (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2007

  $5.80

  An easy to read, fascinating story of the politics behind the poetry, followed by the poetry itself. The Story of Poetry follows the style of this classic new series, with the first half of each volume showing how poetry was as much a reflection and sometime-counterweighted reaction to the current affairs of its own times. The poetry comes alive when we see it set contextually. The Story of Poetry, Volume III: From Pope to Burns, is certain to become a classic and indispensable historical anthology, accessible and comprehensive. '[In the eighteenth century], a rural English wholesomeness survives, but only just. The wider world is one of cultural importations and studied politeness on the one hand, and aggressive xenophobia on the other. A year after Indian printed calicoes were banned because they were too popular, the novelist-to-be Daniel Defoe wrote his one famous poem, The True-Born Englishman (1701), making fun of national prejudices which threatened to impoverish English political and cultural life for years to come. The political point of his poem was rather more ingratiating, for the King of England was not English-born and the King was himself a catalyst of xenophobia...'' If we miss out or over-simplify the eighteenth century, we misread the nineteenth and twentieth and, more to the point, we ignore some extraordinary poetry.' From The Story of Poetry, Volume 3

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $3.25

  In this wonderfully entertaining and instructive book Michael Schmidt gives us a history of English poetry from its beginnings to 1500. The book divides into two halves - the first is a history of the poets' lives, the times during which they were writing, and an account of their works; and the second is an anthology of poetry from the first English poem by Caedmon, which can be dated to about 657AD, to Langland, Gower, Chaucer, Lydgate, Dunbar, and Hawes. Schmidt shows how language and the poetic imagination are shaped by politics and history, and brilliantly describes the workings of Old and Middle English, using modernised texts to render it unintimidating to our modern ears. This is an invaluable book for all readers of poetry and students who will find no other competing volume available. This is the first book in a major four-volume project to provide the most comprehensive history of English poetry.