Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill

by Peter McDonald

Overview

Peter McDonald offers a controversial reading of twentieth-century British and Irish poetry centered on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Serious Poetry provocatively returns these writers to the elements of difficulty and cultural disagreement where they belong.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199247479
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/22/2002
Pages:	234
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.60(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Peter McDonald is Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in English, Christ Church, Oxford.

Table of Contents

1. Rather than Words: The End of Authority? 2. Yeats and Remorse3. Yeats's Poetic Structures4. Three Critics: Eliot, Heaney, Hill5. One of Us: Eliot, Auden, and Four Quartets6. Yeats, Form, and Northern Irish Poetry7. MacNeice's Posterity8. The Pitch of Dissent: Geoffrey HillBibliographyIndex

Editorial Reviews

"In Peter McDonald's important, intelligent and provocative book, a principled attention to form yields genuine insights which elude most critics.... McDonald's reading of Hill is, like all his readings, perspicacious and revealing."—Times Literary Supplement

"An immensely valuable and rigorous book."—The Guardian

From the Publisher