A Little History of Poetry
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
