This book reveals how a remarkable ancient Greek and Latin poetic form -- the alcaic metre -- found its way into English poetry, and continues shaping the imagination of poets today. English poets have always admired the extraordinary beauty and intricacy of the alcaic stanza (Tennyson called it 'the grandest of all measures') and their inventive responses to the ancient alcaic have generated remarkable innovations in the rhythms, sounds and shapes of modern poetry. This is the first book-length study of this neglected strand of English literary history and classical reception.
Attending closely to the rhythm and texture of their verses, John Talbot reveals surprising connections between English poets across five centuries, among them Mary Shelley, Milton, Marvell, Tennyson, Edward FitzGerald, Wilfred Owen, W. H. Auden and Donald Hall. He gives special attention to a flourishing of English alcaics during the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and what it suggests about the changing place of classics and poetic form in contemporary culture.
Recenzijas
This book offers an original study of the reception/appropriation of the so-called Alcaic strophe in English-language poetry, and through deft close readings of several poems from the early modern period up to today rightly demonstrates that a neglect or ignorance of the use of classical metrics comes at the cost of a dimension of poetic expressiveness. -- Peter Liebregts, Professor of Modern Literatures in English, Leiden University, The Netherlands
Papildus informācija
A study of how the ancient poetic form, the Alcaic strophe, entered into the English literary imagination, transformed English poetry, and its flourishing in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Acknowledgements
Preface
1 Coming Late to Latin: Wilfred Owen, John Hollander
2 A Marvel of Metrical Disruptions: The Alcaic Strophe Itself
3 Blossom Again on a Colder Isle: Mary Sidney, Alfred Tennyson
4 The Same, But Not the Same: Tennysons In Memoriam Stanza
5 The Ear Grows Dissatisfied: Robert Bridges, W. H. Auden
Afterword: From Inheritance to Quarry: The Alcaic in Postmodernity
Notes
Index
Bibliography
John Talbot is Associate Professor of English Literature at Brigham Young University, USA. He publishes widely on classical and English literary relations, poetic form and literary translation. He is the author of The Well-Tempered Tantrum (2004), Rough Translation (2012) and contributed to the multi-volume Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature. With Victoria Moul, he is co-editor of C. H. Sisson Reconsidered.
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