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The Routledge anthology of poets on poets : poetic responses to English poetry from Chaucer to Yeats PDF

288 Pages·1994·3.23 MB·English
by  Hopkins
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THE ROUTLEDGE ANTHOLOGY OF POETS ON POETS THE ROUTLEDGE ANTHOLOGY OF POETS ON POETS Poetic responses to English poetry from Chaucer to Yeats Selected, arranged, edited, annotated, and introduced by DAVID HOPKINS London and New York First published in hardback as English Poetry by Routledge 1990 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk Paperback edition first published 1994 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1990, 1994 David Hopkins All right reserved. No part of the this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-203-36011-7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-37267-0 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-11847-6 (Print Edition) CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Sir John Denham (1615–69) 158 Preface ix Abraham Cowley (1618–67) 158 Introduction 1 Richard Lovelace (1618–57) 164 Poets of the later 17th PART ONE: ON POETRY and early 18th centuries 165 English poets’ reflections on the art of John Dryden (1631–1700) 168 poetry 19 Thomas Shadwell (?1642–92) 175 John Wilmot, Earl of PART TWO: ON POETS Rochester (1647–80) 176 English poets’ responses to their peers, John Oldham (1653–83) 177 from Chaucer to Yeats 69 Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720) 178 Poets of the 14th and Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) 178 15th centuries 71 Thomas Parnell (1679–1718) 179 Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343–1400 72 Edward Young (1683–1765) 179 The ballads 83 Alexander Pope (1688–1744) 181 The early Tudor poets 84 John Dyer (1699–1757) 190 Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) 84 James Thomson (1700–48) 190 Henry Howard, Earl of Poets of the mid-18th century 193 Surrey (?1517–47) 85 Samuel Johnson (1709–84) 193 Edmund Spenser (c.1552–99) 86 William Shenstone (1714–63) 194 Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) 93 Thomas Gray (1716–71) 194 Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) Mark Akenside (1721–70) 197 and Mary Herbert, Countess William Collins (1721–59) 197 of Pembroke (1561–1621) 95 Christopher Smart (1722–71) 198 George Chapman (?1559–1634) 96 Thomas Warton (1728–90) 199 Edward Fairfax (d. 1635) 98 William Cowper (1731–1800) 199 Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) 98 Charles Churchill (1732–64) 202 William Shakespeare (1564–1616) 100 Thomas Chatterton (1752–70) 203 The ‘metaphysical’ poets 116 George Crabbe (1754–1832) 204 John Donne (1572–1631) 118 William Blake (1757–1827) 207 Ben Jonson (1572–1637) 124 The Regency and ‘Lake’ poets 209 George Sandys (1578–1644) 133 William Wordsworth (1770–1850) 211 George Herbert (1593–1633) 135 Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) 227 Edmund Waller (1606–87) 136 Samuel Taylor Coleridge Sir Richard Fanshawe (1608–66) 138 (1772–1832) 228 John Milton (1608–74) 139 Robert Southey (1774–1843) 230 Richard Crashaw (?1612–49) 156 James Henry Leigh Hunt Samuel Butler (1612–80) 157 (1784–1859) 231 vi CONTENTS The post-Wordsworth generation 232 George Meredith (1828–1909) 258 George Gordon, Lord Byron William Morris (1834–96) 259 (1788–1824) 233 Algernon Charles Swinburne Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) 238 (1837–1909) 260 John Clare (1793–1864) 244 Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) 261 John Keats (1795–1821) 247 Robert Bridges (1844–1930) 262 Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92) 252 Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) 262 Robert Browning (1812–89) 254 William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) 263 Emily Brontë (1818–48) 257 Indexes 267 Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61) 258 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks are due to the following for permission to reproduce material in this book: Baylor University for Browning’s epigram on Swinburne from Robert Secor, ‘Swinburne at his lyre; a new epigram by Browning’, Studies in Browning and His Circle, (1974) 2, 2, pp. 58–60; Collins Publishers for Edmund Blunden’s The Death Mask of John Clare’ from Poems of Many Years (1957); the executors and estate of C.Day Lewis and The Hogarth Press and Jonathan Cape for C.Day Lewis’s ‘Birthday Poem for Thomas Hardy’ from Complete Poems (1954); Faber & Faber Ltd for W.H.Auden’s ‘New Year Letter’ from Collected Poems and ‘In Memory of W.B.Yeats’ from The English Auden, for quotations from T.S.Eliot’s The Metaphysical Poets’ in Selected Essays and from Ted Hughes’s Poetry in the Making and his ‘Note’ in A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse; London Magazine for the interview between Philip Larkin and John Haffenden from London Magazine (1980) n.s. 20; Longman for Roger Lonsdale’s text of William Collins’s ‘Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands’ from the Longman Annotated English Poets series; Macmillan Publishing Company, New York for Thomas Hardy’s ‘A Singer Asleep (Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1837–1909)’ and ‘George Meredith (1828–1909)’—both from The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, edited by James Gibson (New York, Macmillan, 1978)—for W.B.Yeats’s The Symbolism of Poetry’, ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’, ‘The Tragic Theatre’, ‘Edmund Spenser’, ‘William Blake and the Imagination’, and The Happiest of Poets’—all from W.B.Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York, Macmillan, 1961) and Autobiography (New York, Macmillan, 1970); Professor Eric Robinson and Curtis Brown for John Clare’s ‘Shadows of Taste’ and ‘Lines on Cowper’ from John Clare (Oxford Authors) and his ‘To the Rural Muse’ from The Later Poems of John Clare (Oxford English Texts) and ‘To the Memory of Keats’ from The Early Poems of John Clare (Oxford English Texts); Stanley Thornes (Publishers) Ltd for Ted Hughes’s Introduction to Here Today. PREFACE This volume contains a collection of poetic responses by the English poets to one another’s work. It does not attempt to represent the full range of remarks which English poets have made about their fellow practitioners, but, rather, concentrates on those moments when, in reflecting on their art in general, on their own work, or on the work of one or more of their peers, they have been prompted to exhibit some features of the very activity which they are describing or commending. The majority of the items included are full-dress poems, or extracts from larger poems, but I have included poets’ prose comments in those instances where the writing seems, in whole or in part, to be ‘aspiring to the condition of poetry’—where the writer is deploying rhythmical and metaphorical effects, verbal colouring, heightened diction, or impassioned rhetoric to a degree that one would not normally expect to find in discursive prose. In the Introduction, I attempt to suggest the particular interest of poets’ specifically poetic responses to their art and to their fellow artists. Any anthologist (particularly one faced with a body of material as large as that potentially eligible for the present volume) must establish clear and reasoned principles of selection if the end-product is to seem a coherent book, rather than merely an arbitrarily assembled collection of snippets. But an anthologist must also recognise that, however unified he can make his collection, however much each of his extracts is freshly illuminated by the new environment in which it finds itself, an anthology can never be more than a provisional holding-together of a selective body of material, each item of which is temporarily ‘on loan’ from a number of other contexts in which it has slightly different kinds of significance. Many items in this anthology are excerpted from larger works—the most immediate and important of all the contexts in which they live. Beyond that, they form parts of their authors’ total oeuvres. But they are also parts of other larger wholes. The English poets’ responses to one another’s work can be only very partially represented by collecting their explicit statements. To gain a complete sense of what the English poets meant to one another, one would have to take stock of the numerous and diverse ways in which the work of one poet is present in others’ work: in translation, adaptation, imitation, parody, allusion, echo—modes which often reveal poets’ reactions to their peers more fully and intimately than their explicit comments. English poets have, moreover, been sometimes more deeply inspired and influenced by foreign poets than by their own compatriots. And the work of some poets shows that they were deeply affected by peers on whom they left either little or no direct commentary, or commentary which gives a very misleading or imperfect sense of the nature of their interest. A

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A comprehensive record of the history and progress of English poetry. It collects together writings by all the major and some of the lesser-known figures from Chaucer to Yeats, demonstrating their vivid responses to each other. Abstract: A collection of writings by major poetic figures from Chaucer
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