The Cambridge History of English Poetry

Michael O'Neill

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780521883061
• eBook ISBN:
  9781316183212
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Poetry written in English is uniquely powerful and suggestive in its capacity to surprise, unsettle, shock, console, and move. The Cambridge History of English Poetry offers sparklingly fresh and dynamic readings of an extraordinary range of poets and poems from Beowulf to Alice Oswald. An international team of experts explores how poets in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland use language and to what effect, examining questions of form, tone, and voice; they comment, too, on how formal choices are inflected by the poet's time and place. The Cambridge History of English Poetry is the most comprehensive and authoritative history of the field from early medieval times to the present. It traces patterns of continuity, transformation, transition, and development. Covering a remarkable array of poets and poems, and featuring an extensive bibliography, the scope and depth of this major work of reference make it required reading for anyone interested in poetry.

Table of contents

• Cover
• THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH POETRY
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Old English poetry
• Chapter 2 The Gawain-poet and medieval romance
• Chapter 3 Late fourteenth-century poetry (Chaucer, Gower, Langland and their legacy)
• Chapter 4 Langland: Piers Plowman
• Chapter 5 Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales
• Chapter 6 Late medieval literature in Scotland: Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas
• Chapter 7 Sixteenth-century poetry: Skelton, Wyatt and Surrey
• Chapter 8 Spenser
• Chapter 9 Sidney, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan sonnet and lyric
• Chapter 10 The narrative poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare
• Chapter 11 Seventeenth-century poetry 1: poetry in the age of Donne and Jonson
• Chapter 12 Seventeenth-century poetry 2: Herbert, Vaughan, Philips, Cowley, Crashaw, Marvell
• Chapter 13 Milton’s shorter poems
• Chapter 14 Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes
• Chapter 15 Restoration poetry: Behn, Dryden and their contemporaries
• Chapter 16 Dryden: major poems
• Chapter 17 Swift
• Chapter 18 Poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century: Pope, Johnson and the couplet
• Chapter 19 Eighteenth-century women poets
• Chapter 20 Longer eighteenth-century poems (Akenside, Thomson, Young, Cowper and others)
• Chapter 21 Lyric poetry: 1740–1790
• Chapter 22 Romantic poetry: an overview
• Chapter 23 Blake’s poetry and prophecies
• Chapter 24 Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads and other poems
• Chapter 25 Wordsworth’s The Prelude and The Excursion
• Chapter 26 Second-generation Romantic poetry 1: Hunt, Byron, Moore
• Chapter 27 Byron’s Don Juan
• Chapter 28 Second-generation Romantic poetry 2: Shelley and Keats
• Chapter 29 Third-generation Romantic poetry: Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hemans, Landon
• Chapter 30 Women poets of the Romantic period (Barbauld to Landon)
• Chapter 31 Victorian poetry: an overview
• Chapter 32 Tennyson
• Chapter 33 Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
• Chapter 34 Emily Brontë, Arnold, Clough
• Chapter 35 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne
• Chapter 36 Christina Rossetti and Hopkins
• Chapter 37 Later Victorian voices 1: James Thomson, Symons, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Housman
• Chapter 38 Later Victorian voices 2: Davidson, Kipling, ‘Michael Field’ (Bradley and Cooper), Lee-Hamilton, Kendall, Webster
• Chapter 39 Modernist and modern poetry: an overview
• Chapter 40 Hardy and Mew
• Chapter 41 Yeats
• Chapter 42 Imagism
• Chapter 43 T. S. Eliot
• Chapter 44 Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon and Edward Thomas
• Chapter 45 Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender: the thirties poetry
• Chapter 46 Dylan Thomas and the poetry of the 1940s
• Chapter 47 Larkin and the Movement
• Chapter 48 Three twentieth-century women poets: Riding, Smith, Plath
• Chapter 49 Hughes and Heaney
• Chapter 50 Hill
• Chapter 51 Mahon, Longley, Muldoon, McGuckian, Carson, Boland and other Irish poets
• Chapter 52 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 1: the radical tradition
• Chapter 53 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 2
• Bibliography
• Index