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Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-88306-1 - The Cambridge History of English Poetry Edited by Michael O’Neill Frontmatter More information THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH POETRY Poetry written in English is uniquely powerful and suggestive in its capacity to surprise, unsettle, shock, console and move. The Cambridge History of English Poetry offers sparklingly fresh and dynamic readings of an extraordinary range of poets and poems from Beowulf to Alice Oswald. An international team of experts explores how poets in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland use language and to what effect, examining questions of form, tone and voice; they comment, too, on how formal choices are inflected by the poet’s time and place. The Cambridge History of English Poetry is the most comprehensive and authoritative history of the field from Anglo-Saxon times to the present. It traces patterns of con- tinuity, transformation, transition and development. Covering a remarkable array of poets and poems, and featuring an extensive bibliography, the scope and depth of this major work of reference make it required reading for anyone interested in poetry. M ICHAEL O’N EILL is Professor of English at Durham University. He has published widely on poetry and is a published poet himself. His recent publications include The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American and Irish Poetry (2007)and Wheel (2008), a collection of poems. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-88306-1 - The Cambridge History of English Poetry Edited by Michael O’Neill Frontmatter More information THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH POETRY * Edited by MICHAEL O’NEILL © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-88306-1 - The Cambridge History of English Poetry Edited by Michael O’Neill Frontmatter More information cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU,UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521883061 © Cambridge University Press 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2010 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-521-88306-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-88306-1 - The Cambridge History of English Poetry Edited by Michael O’Neill Frontmatter More information Contents Notes on contributors x Acknowledgments xvi Introduction 1 michael o’neill 1 . Old English poetry 7 bernard o’donoghue 2 . The Gawain-poet and medieval romance 26 corinne saunders 3 . Late fourteenth-century poetry (Chaucer, Gower, Langland and their legacy) 43 wendy scase 4 . Langland: Piers Plowman 63 a. v. c. schmidt 5 . Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales 81 laura varnam 6 . Late medieval literature in Scotland: Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas 96 felicity riddy 7 . Sixteenth-century poetry: Skelton, Wyatt and Surrey 115 elizabeth heale v © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-88306-1 - The Cambridge History of English Poetry Edited by Michael O’Neill Frontmatter More information List of contents 8 . Spenser 136 andrew hadfield 9 . Sidney, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan sonnet and lyric 154 katharine a. craik 10 . The narrative poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare 173 paul edmondson 11 . Seventeenth-century poetry 1: poetry in the age of Donne and Jonson 192 jonathan post 12 . Seventeenth-century poetry 2: Herbert, Vaughan, Philips, Cowley, Crashaw, Marvell 211 alison shell 13 . Milton’s shorter poems 231 barbara k. lewalski 14 . Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes 255 barbara k. lewalski 15 . Restoration poetry: Behn, Dryden and their contemporaries 281 hester jones 16 . Dryden: major poems 299 steven n. zwicker 17 . Swift 318 claude rawson 18 . Poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century: Pope, Johnson and the couplet 333 claude rawson 19 . Eighteenth-century women poets 358 christine gerrard vi © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-88306-1 - The Cambridge History of English Poetry Edited by Michael O’Neill Frontmatter More information List of contents 20 . Longer eighteenth-century poems (Akenside, Thomson, Young, Cowper and others) 378 richard terry 21 . Lyric poetry: 1740–1790 397 david fairer 22 . Romantic poetry: an overview 418 seamus perry 23 . Blake’s poetry and prophecies 440 john beer 24 . Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads and other poems 456 timothy webb 25 . Wordsworth’s The Prelude and The Excursion 470 alison hickey 26 . Second-generation Romantic poetry 1: Hunt, Byron, Moore 487 jane stabler 27 . Byron’s Don Juan 506 bernard beatty 28 . Second-generation Romantic poetry 2: Shelley and Keats 524 michael o’neill 29 . Third-generation Romantic poetry: Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hemans, Landon 542 michael bradshaw 30 . Women poets of the Romantic period (Barbauld to Landon) 561 heidi thomson vii © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-88306-1 - The Cambridge History of English Poetry Edited by Michael O’Neill Frontmatter More information List of contents 31 . Victorian poetry: an overview 576 richard cronin 32 . Tennyson 596 robert douglas-fairhurst 33 . Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning 617 herbert f. tucker 34 . Emily Brontë, Arnold, Clough 635 michael o’neill 35 . Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne 649 david g. riede 36 . Christina Rossetti and Hopkins 669 catherine phillips 37 . Later Victorian voices 1: James Thomson, Symons, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Housman 686 nicholas shrimpton 38 . Later Victorian voices 2: Davidson, Kipling, ‘Michael Field’ (Bradley and Cooper), Lee-Hamilton, Kendall, Webster 706 francis o’gorman 39 . Modernist and modern poetry: an overview 725 jason harding 40 . Hardy and Mew 746 ralph pite 41 . Yeats 767 peter vassallo 42 . Imagism 787 vincent sherry viii © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-88306-1 - The Cambridge History of English Poetry Edited by Michael O’Neill Frontmatter More information List of contents 43 . T. S. Eliot 807 gareth reeves 44 . Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon and Edward Thomas 824 mark rawlinson 45 . Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender: the thirties poetry 844 michael o’neill 46 . Dylan Thomas and poetry of the 1940s 858 john goodby 47 . Larkin and the Movement 879 stephen regan 48 . Three twentieth-century women poets: Riding, Smith, Plath 897 alice entwistle 49 . Hughes and Heaney 918 edward larrissy 50 . Hill 936 andrew michael roberts 51 . Mahon, Longley, Muldoon, McGuckian, Carson, Boland and other Irish poets 956 stephen regan 52 . Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 1: the radical tradition 970 peter barry 53 . Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 2 988 jamie mckendrick Bibliography 1005 Index 1038 ix © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-88306-1 - The Cambridge History of English Poetry Edited by Michael O’Neill Frontmatter More information Notes on contributors P ETER B ARRY is Professor of English at Aberystwyth University. His most recent books are Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (2006) and Literature in Contexts (2007). B ERNARD B EATTY is Senior Fellow in the School of English at the University of Liverpool and Associate Fellow in the School of Divinity at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Byron’s Don Juan (1985) and Byron’s Don Juan and Other Poems (1987), and edited The Byron Journal from 1988 to 2005. J OHN B EER is Emeritus Professor of English Literature and Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. His books include Blake’s Humanism (1968), Blake’s Visionary Universe (1969), Romantic Consciousness: Blake to Mary Shelley (2003), Post-Romantic Consciousness: Dickens to Plath (2003), Romantic Influences (1993) and William Blake: A Literary Life (2005). M ICHAEL B RADSHAW is the author of Resurrection Songs: The Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (2001), the co-editor with Ute Berns of The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes (2007) and has edited Beddoes’s Death’s Jest-Book: the 1829 Text (2003) and Selected Poetry (1999). He is currently Professor of English at Edge Hill University. K ATHARINE A. CRAIK is Senior Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University. She has published widely on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and her book Reading Sensations in Early Modern England appeared in 2007. R ICHARD C RONIN is Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. His most recent book is Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840 (2002). R OBERT D OUGLAS-FAIRHURST is a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the author of Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2002), and has edited Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ and Other Christmas Books (2006) and Great Expectations (2008), and co-edited, with Seamus Perry, Tennyson among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays (2009). He is currently writing a book about Dickens’s early career. P AUL E DMONDSON is Head of Learning and Research at The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
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