Drinks With Dead Poets: A Season of Poe, Whitman, Byron, and the Brontes

by Glyn Maxwell

Overview

A spirited homage to the departed literary greats—set in an entrancing English village—this novel tells the tale of a profound autumn term with Poe, Yeats, Whitman, Dickinson, and the Brontës.

“I am walking along a country lane with no earthly idea why . . .”

Poet Glyn Maxwell wakes up in a mysterious village one autumn day. He has no idea how he got there—is he dead? In a coma? Dreaming?—but he has a strange feeling there’s a class to teach. And isn’t that the poet Keats wandering down the lane? Why not ask him to give a reading, do a Q and A, hit the pub with the students afterwards?

Soon the whole of the autumn term stretches ahead, with Byron, Yeats and Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, the Brownings, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Wilfred Owen, and many more all on their way to give readings in the humble village hall.

And everything these famed personalities say—in class, on stage, at the Cross Keys pub—comes verbatim from these poets’ diaries, essays, or letters. A dreamy novel of a profound autumn term with Poe, Yeats, Whitman, Dickinson, and the Brontës.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681774985
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	08/08/2017
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Glyn Maxwell is one of Britain's major poets. His plays include The Lifeblood, After Troy, and The Only Girl in the World. His novel Blue Burneau was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize. His opera libretti include The Lion's Face, The Firework Maker's Daughter, Seven Angels, and Nothing. He has taught at Princeton, Columbia, and New York University, and he reviews poetry for the New York Times. He is the author of One Thousand Nights and Counting: Selected Poems, as well as the recently published On Poetry, which considers the art form through the eyes of four imaginary students. Their journeys continue in Drinks With Dead Poets.
Glyn Maxwell is one of Britain's major poets. His plays include The Lifeblood, After Troy, and The Only Girl in the World. His novel Blue Burneau was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize. His opera libretti include The Lion's Face, The Firework Maker's Daughter, Seven Angels, and Nothing. He has taught at Princeton, Columbia, and New York University, and he reviews poetry for the New York Times. He is the author of One Thousand Nights and Counting: Selected Poems, as well as the recently published On Poetry, which considers the art form through the eyes of four imaginary students. Their journeys continue in Drinks With Dead Poets.

Editorial Reviews

08/28/2017
Famous poets help a teacher with his writing seminar at a dreamlike university in this metafictional novel from poet Maxwell (One Thousand Nights and Counting). Glyn Maxwell is a writer and professor teaching a class at a remote unnamed college, and every week the poet he is teaching to the class mysteriously shows up to do a reading. Nobody seems to find it odd when Lord Byron and Walt Whitman mysteriously show up on campus—nobody except for Glyn himself, who is trying to figure out how he arrived on campus, where he is exactly, how he ended up teaching this class, and why every day is a Thursday. The author Maxwell blurs the lines between prose and poetry and between fiction and reality as he takes readers on a surreal journey full of literary criticism and metrical analyses, all guided by the visiting poets who speak entirely in quotes from their real-life journals and letters. The surreal quality of the writing is offset by Maxwell’s wonderfully dry sense of humor. Readers of metafiction will enjoy this rabbit hole of luminary poets. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Part dream-memoir, part picaresque novel, and part defense of the poetic art form, the book is a wholly brilliant and often comical evocation of a mysterious university campus, its students and visiting lecturers, and the altogether precarious status of poetry within contemporary academia. Brilliant.

Harvard Review

This novel packs so much truth and so many conspicuously educational moments—along with character studies of 12 major nineteenth-century poets and writers—that it defies classification. An intoxicating blend of fiction, memoir, and literary criticism.

Booklist (starred)

Defiantly and exhilaratingly poetic. I like the urgency and stringency of Maxwell’s advice, and it should be useful to students coming to a poem. Arguing with this book is part of the joy of it: it’s provocative and opinionated and personal and urgent; by turns good-humored and intemperate; and full of earned advice on the writing and reading of poems.

Nick Laird - The New York Review of Books [praise for Glyn Maxwell’s 'On Poetry']

"This novel packs so much truth and so many conspicuously educational moments—along with character studies of 12 major nineteenth-century poets and writers—that it defies classification. An intoxicating blend of fiction, memoir, and literary criticism."

Booklist

"Defiantly and exhilaratingly poetic. I like the urgency and stringency of Maxwell’s advice, and it should be useful to students coming to a poem. Arguing with this book is part of the joy of it: it’s provocative and opinionated and personal and urgent; by turns good-humored and intemperate; and full of earned advice on the writing and reading of poems."

The New York Review of Books [praise for Glyn Maxwell's 'On Poetry'] - Nick Laird

06/15/2017
At the start of this novel-cum-course syllabus, Maxwell, award-winning British poet and protagonist/narrator, materializes on a road outside an idyllic English university town. He's not sure whether he's dreaming or in heaven, but he knows he's teaching a poetry course and that the ghosts of the poets on his 12-week syllabus will appear, one each week, for a reading to his class. The novel, nearly incoherent at times, is rife with Britishisms (milk float, anyone?), yet like the best poetry, there is much to be found between the lines and blank spaces. Classroom camaraderie blooms over the term; we're thrust into an adjunct professor's frustrations and feel the glorious high of teaching. Visiting poets Keats, Poe, Coleridge (stoned again!), John Clare, and Byron, to mention a few, become real to us, and their ramblings, extracted from their actual writings, are no more random than any guest lecturer's. VERDICT If 19th-century poetry is a gap in your education, Maxwell's charming and learned novel will fill it more than you could hope. It joins his marvelous nonfiction text, On Poetry; reading both is not required, but you'll want to.—Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Library Journal

2017-05-15
Dream, fantasy, coma, or afterlife? One of these surely explains why an established poet wakes up one day to find himself in a tiny English village teaching a poetry course and enjoying visits from Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, and other literary geniuses.Like an upscale version of the Web series "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee," British poet and playwright Maxwell's (On Poetry, 2012, etc.) novel presents intimate conversations with stars of Western civilization's poetic canon along with liberal quantities of alcohol. The Brownings, Coleridge, Yeats, and more take turns visiting a nameless village in contemporary England where the Academy is holding a series of fall courses and author/central character Glyn Maxwell is teaching poetry to a group of eight students. Exercises, individual tutorials, and seminars on the work of landmark poets are enhanced by appearances from the long-dead writers themselves; they perform readings, take Q-and-A sessions, and often end up in the pub afterward. But this isn't real life, and Maxwell knows it. So is he dead? Why is it always Thursday? And when can he leave? This curiosity of a book is threaded with questions, some of which are answered by the poets in their own words, which have been culled by Maxwell from diaries, essays, and letters. Poe complains: "I've made no money"; Byron—a big, confident hit with the students—comments: "Don't be afraid of praising me too highly." Part comic novel, part confession, part literary critique, Maxwell's book is both creative and self-indulgent, packed with quotations, musings, and dissections of rhyme schemes. The book's fictional elements (characters, plot) play a poor second to its expansive, good-natured embrace of all things poetic. Within the loose format of a campus novel lurks a peculiar but not unpersuasive agglomeration of ideas, opinions, and imaginings about poets and their work.

Kirkus Reviews