A Little History of Poetry

by John Carey

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

It's always the perfect time to read a little history of poetry — and John Carey’s book is exactly that. It will make you wonder, with smile and heart, why EVERY month isn’t National Poetry Month. Which is to say — it’s PERFECT for any season! The most fun classroom you could keep handy.

A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature--selected as the literature book of the year by the London Times
 
“[A] fizzing, exhilarating book.”—Sebastian Faulks, Sunday Times, London

“Delightful.’”—New York Times Book Review
 
What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work—over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. But this Little History is about some that have not.
 
John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem “great” in the first place.
 
For readers both young and old, this little history shines a light for readers on the richness of the world’s poems—and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300232226
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	04/21/2020
Series:	Little Histories
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	107,965
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

John Carey is emeritus professor at Oxford. His books include The Essential Paradise Lost, What Good Are the Arts?, studies of Donne and Dickens, and a biography of William Golding. The Unexpected Professor, his memoir, was a Sunday Times best-seller.

Table of Contents

1 Gods, Heroes and Monsters 1

The Epic of Gilgamesh

2 War, Adventure, Love 7

Homer, Sappho

3 Latin Classics 13

Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Catullus, Juvenal

4 Anglo-Saxon Poetry 19

Beowulf, Laments and Riddles

5 Continental Masters of the Middle Ages 25

Dante, Daniel, Petrarch, Villon

6 A European Poet 31

Chaucer

7 Poets of the Seen World and the Unseen 37

The Gawain Poet, Hafez, Langland

8 Tudor Court Poets 43

Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser

9 Elizabethan Love Poets 50

Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney

10 Copernicus in Poetry 58

John Donne

11 An Age of Individualism 65

Jonson, Herrick, Marvell

12 Religious Individualists 74

Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne

13 Poetry from the World Beyond 83

John Milton

14 The Augustan Age 91

Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Goldsmith

15 The Other Eighteenth Century 98

Montagu, Egerton, Finch, Tollet, Leapor, Yearsley, Barbauld, Blamire, Baillie, Wheatley, Duck, Clare, Thomson, Cowper, Crabbe, Gray, Smart

16 Communal Poetry 105

Popular Ballads and Hymns

17 Lyrical Ballads, and After 112

Wordsworth and Coleridge

18 Second-Generation Romantics 120

Keats and Shelley

19 Romantic Eccentrics 128

Blake, Byron, Burns

20 From Romanticism to Modernism in German Poetry 137

Goethe, Heine, Rilke

21 Making Russian Literature 145

Pushkin, Lermontov

22 Great Victorians 152

Tennyson, Browning, Clough, Arnold

23 Reform, Resolve and Religion: Victorian Women Poets 160

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti

24 American Revolutionaries 168

Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson

25 Shaking the Foundations 177

Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Valery, Dylan Thomas, Edward Lear, Charles Dodgson, Swinburne, Katharine Harris Bradley, Edith Emma Cooper, Charlotte Mew, Oscar Wilde

26 New Voices at the End of an Era 184

Hardy, Housman, Kipling, Hopkins

27 The Georgian Poets 192

Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, Rupert Brooke, Walter De La Mare, Wh. Davies, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, W.W. Gibson, Robert Graves, D.H. Lawrence

28 Poetry of the First World War 200

Stadler, Toller, Grenfell, Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg, Gurney, Cole, Cannan, Sinclair, McCrae

29 The Great Escapist 208

W.B. Yeats

30 Inventing Modernism 215

Eliot, Pound

31 West Meets East 222

Waley, Pound, the Imagists

32 American Modernists 230

Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Esther Popel, Helene Johnson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes

33 Getting Over Modernism 239

Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop

34 The Thirties Poets 247

Auden, Spender, MacNeice

35 Poetry of the Second World War 255

Douglas, Lewis, Keyes, Fuller, Ross, Causley, Reed, Simpson, Shapiro, Wilbur, Jarrell, Pudney, Ewart, Sitwell, Feinstein, Stanley-Wrench, Clark

36 American Confessional Poets, and Others 262

Lowell, Berryman, Snodgrass, Sexton, Roethke

37 The Movement Poets and Associates 269

Larkin, Enright, Jennings, Gunn, Betjeman, Stevie Smith

38 Fatal Attractions 276

Hughes, Plath

39 Poets in Politics 282

Tagore, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Brodsky, Lorca, Neruda, Paz, Seferis, Seifert, Herbert, MacDiarmid, R.S. Thomas, Amichai

40 Poets Who Cross Boundaries 289

Heaney, Walcott, Angelou, Oliver, Murray

Acknowledgements 296

Index 305

Editorial Reviews

02/17/2020

In this clever, wide-ranging history, British literary critic Carey (The Essential Paradise Lost) provides a tour of Western poetry, from Homer to Maya Angelou. Each brief chapter tackles one or more poets representative of a particular era, with excerpts from their works, brief accounts of their lives, and Carey’s insightful critical commentaries. His writing is instructive yet wry, as in his description of Petrarch’s love poetry as “numbingly tedious” and consisting of “a lot of weeping, but little else.” The reader is given a sense of how poets can be compared and contrasted with one another (Keats and Shelley, for example, as fellow exemplars of Romanticism who were, respectively, profoundly sensual and consumed with abstract ideals). Carey’s is a very traditional look at the Western canon, meaning the poets represented are overwhelmingly white, and perhaps even more overwhelmingly British, though a fair share of women are covered. Also, the book ends on poems written in the 1960s and ’70s, so there is no contemporary ground covered. In any case, it is called a “little history,” so one cannot expect it to be all things to all people. Those looking for a shrewdly condensed and accessible history of poetry could not ask for a better guide. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

[The] book reviewer and Oxford don has great fun, galloping through 4,000 years of verse. Reputations are flayed and poetic gems are uncovered.”—Robbie Millen and Andrew Holgate, The Times and Sunday Times, “Best Books of 2020”

 “[A] fizzing, exhilarating book”—Sebastian Faulks, Sunday Times

“Carey’s delightful survey never takes itself or its subject too seriously. ‘Over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten,’ he writes. ‘This is a book about some that have not.’”—New York Times Book Review

“Don’t let the diminutive title fool you. This is an expansive, not to mention accessible, tour of poetry’s importance and evolution, from ‘Beowulf’ to Shakespeare to Maya Angelou and beyond.”—Washington Post 2020 Holiday Gift Guide

“Few modern literature professors are capable of writing a book as interesting and mischievous as this.”—James Marriott, The Times ‘Best Literary Non-Fiction Books of 2020’

“This supremely compact and erudite introduction doesn’t just pack in a bunch of facts and potted biographies, it somehow manages to convey the transcendent glory of the form through the ages, whether it’s sagas, hymns, ballads or verse...Carey is frighteningly well informed but always accessible, and this guide will offer riches whether you’re a total newbie or a poetry buff.”—Sybille Bedford, The Sunday Times 'Best Literary Books of 2020' 
 

 

“In this clever, wide-ranging history, British literary critic Carey provides a tour of Western poetry, from Homer to Maya Angelou. Each brief chapter tackles one or more poets representative of a particular era, with excerpts from their works, brief accounts of their lives, and Carey’s insightful critical commentaries. . . . Those looking for a shrewdly condensed and accessible history of poetry could not ask for a better guide.”—Publishers Weekly

“A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray. . . . Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.”—Kirkus Reviews

“An Oxford don, John Carey has a remarkably unpretentious and encyclopedic knowledge of names, places, poems, poets, and poetic moments and movements, which he evinces while offering a subtle critique of modernist obscurity.”—James P. Lenfestey, Rain Taxi

“Warm in tone, informative, generous in its sympathies, inviting in its choices, with a clear emphasis on human stories underpinning poetic achievement.”—Emma Smith, author of This is Shakespeare

“This wonderfully positive and vivid history is a delight on every page ... Carey’s sparkling Little History of Poetry is an astonishingly full introduction to English poetry from Beowulf to the present, set in a framework extending in place and time from Gilgamesh to Akhmatova and Seferis.”—Bernard O'Donoghue, Winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award

“Here is an informative, fast-moving book … Like Carey’s previous works, it’s forceful as well as clear, and it’s populist, no-nonsense and anti-elite in its sympathies. Many people may find new favourites here.”—Stephanie Burt, Professor of English, Harvard University

“Books about poetry are rarely page turners, but Carey’s little history is gripping, is unputdownable! Reading this book and its galaxy of poets is like looking up at the sky and seeing the whole wheeling and constellated universe.”—Daljit Nagra, author of Look We Have Coming to Dover!

“An elegant history of poetry, what it is, what it does, why it matters, written in an authoritative and engaging voice. Masterly.”—Ruth Padel, author of 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem

From the Publisher

2020-02-09
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.

In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

Kirkus Reviews

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