The Life of Words

The Life of Words PDF Author: David-Antoine Williams
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192540548
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
For centuries, investigations into the origins of words were entwined with investigations into the origins of humanity and the cosmos. With the development of modern etymological practice in the nineteenth century, however, many cherished etymologies were shown to be impossible, and the very idea of original 'true meaning' asserted in the etymology of 'etymology' declared a fallacy. Structural linguistics later held that the relationship between sound and meaning in language was 'arbitrary', or 'unmotivated', a truth that has survived with small modification until today. On the other hand, the relationship between sound and meaning has been a prime motivator of poems, at all times throughout history. The Life of Words studies a selection of poets inhabiting our 'Age of the Arbitrary', whose auditory-semantic sensibilities have additionally been motivated by a historical sense of the language, troubled as it may be by claims and counterclaims of 'fallacy' or 'true meaning'. Arguing that etymology activates peculiar kinds of epistemology in the modern poem, the book pays extended attention to poems by G. M. Hopkins, Anne Waldman, Ciaran Carson, and Anne Carson, and to the collected works of Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, R. F. Langley, and J. H. Prynne.

Without Title

Without Title PDF Author: Geoffrey Hill
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
Praise for Geoffrey Hill's newest collection of poems: "Without Title, his new collection, combines the force and freedom of Hill's narrative verse with a renewed faith in his masterly talents for form and wordplay. The result is alarmingly good; a collection of lyrics on the difficulties of ageing, the problems of belief and the vagaries of language bracketing a sequence of pindarics in which Hill, ostensibly responding to thoughts of the Italian poet Cesare Pavese, meditates at length on both their lives and considers the place of a poet in the world."-Tim Martin, Independent on Sunday

National Geographic Bird Coloration

National Geographic Bird Coloration PDF Author: Geoffrey Edward Hill
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1426205716
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Why is a cardinal red and a bluebird blue? How has color camouflage evolved? These are just a few of the fascinating questions explored in this work on coloration and plumage, and their key role in avian life. 200 full-color photos.

Contemporary British Poetry

Contemporary British Poetry PDF Author: James Acheson
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791427682
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
This collection of original essays focuses on new and continuing movements in British Poetry. It offers a wide ranging look at feminist, working class, and other poets of diverse cultural backgrounds.

Skeptical Music

Skeptical Music PDF Author: David Bromwich
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226075600
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Skeptical Music collects the essays on poetry that have made David Bromwich one of the most widely admired critics now writing. Both readers familiar with modern poetry and newcomers to poets like Marianne Moore and Hart Crane will relish this collection for its elegance and power of discernment. Each essay stakes a definitive claim for the modernist style and its intent to capture an audience beyond the present moment. The two general essays that frame Skeptical Music make Bromwich's aesthetic commitments clear. In "An Art without Importance," published here for the first time, Bromwich underscores the trust between author and reader that gives language its subtlety and depth, and makes the written word adequate to the reality that poetry captures. For Bromwich, understanding the work of a poet is like getting to know a person; it is a kind of reading that involves a mutual attraction of temperaments. The controversial final essay, "How Moral Is Taste?," explores the points at which aesthetic and moral considerations uneasily converge. In this timely essay, Bromwich argues that the wish for excitement that poetry draws upon is at once primitive and irreducible. Skeptical Music most notably offers incomparable readings of individual poets. An essay on the complex relationship between Hart Crane and T. S. Eliot shows how the delicate shifts of tone and shading in their work register both affinity and resistance. A revealing look at W. H. Auden traces the process by which the voice of a generation changed from prophet to domestic ironist. Whether discussing heroism in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, considering self-reflection in the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, or exploring the battle between the self and its images in the work of John Ashbery, Skeptical Music will make readers think again about what poetry is, and even more important, why it still matters.

A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry

A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry PDF Author: Nigel Alderman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118646940
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
This volume introduces students to the most important figures, movements and trends in post-war British and Irish poetry. An historical overview and critical introduction to the poetry published in Britain and Ireland over the last half-century Introduces students to figures including Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Andrew Motion Takes an integrative approach, emphasizing the complex negotiations between the British and Irish poetic traditions, and pulling together competing tendencies and positions Written by critics from Britain, Ireland, and the United States Includes suggestions for further reading and a chronology, detailing the most important writers, volumes and events

Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, 1787-1842

Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, 1787-1842 PDF Author: Richard Gravil
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1847603459
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, the most comprehensive critical study of the poet since the 1960s, presents the poet as balladist, sonneteer, minstrel, elegist, prophet of nature, and national bard. The book argues that Wordsworth's uniquely various oeuvre is unified by his sense of bardic vocation. Like Walt Whitman or the bards of Cumbria, Wordsworth sees himself as 'the people's remembrancer'. Like them, he sings of nature and endurance, laments the fallen, fosters national independence and liberty. His task is to reconcile in one society 'the living and the dead' and to nurture both 'the people' and 'the kind'. Review Comment: 'This erudite exposition, profligate with its ideas ... succeeds as few others have done in apprehending Wordsworth's career holistically, incorporating all its diversities and apparent inconsistencies into a unified vision. It justifies fully the notion proposed by Hughes and Heaney that he was England's last national poet.' - Duncan Wu, Review of English Studies

Ireland, Literature, and the Coast

Ireland, Literature, and the Coast PDF Author: Nicholas Allen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192599712
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The island of Ireland is home to one of the world's great literary and artistic traditions. This book reads Irish literature and art in context of the island's coastal and maritime cultures, beginning with the late imperial experiences of Jack and William Butler Yeats and ending with the contemporary work of Anne Enright and Sinead Morrissey. It includes chapters on key historical texts such as Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands, and on contemporary writers including Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Kevin Barry. It sets a diverse range of writing and visual art in a fluid panorama of liquid associations that connect Irish literature to an archipelago of other times and places. Situated within contemporary conversations about the blue and the environmental humanities, this book builds on the upsurge of interest in seas and coasts in literary studies, presenting James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, John Banville, and many others in new coastal and maritime contexts. In doing so, it creates a literary and visual narrative of Irish coastal cultures across a seaboard that extends to a planetary configuration of imagined islands.

The Rift in the Lute

The Rift in the Lute PDF Author: Maximilian De Gaynesford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198797265
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
What is it for poetry to be serious and to be taken seriously? What is it to be open to poetry, attuned to what it says, alive to what it does? These questions call equally on poetry and philosophy, but poetry and philosophy have an ancient quarrel. Maximilian de Gaynesford converts their mutual antipathy into something mutually enhancing.

The Walkers of Southgate, a Famous Brotherhood of Cricketers

The Walkers of Southgate, a Famous Brotherhood of Cricketers PDF Author: W. A. Bettesworth
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cricket
Languages : en
Pages : 550

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Book Description


Debrett's Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage, and Companionage

Debrett's Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage, and Companionage PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Baronetage
Languages : en
Pages : 1708

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Book Description