Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry


Book Description

Recent research into a self-taught tradition of English rural poetry has begun to offer a radically new dimension to our view of the role of poetry in the literary culture of the eighteenth century. In this important new study John Goodridge offers a detailed reading of key rural poems of the period, examines the ways in which eighteenth-century poets adapted Virgilian Georgic models, and reveals an illuminating link between rural poetry and agricultural and folkloric developments. Goodridge compares poetic accounts of rural labour by James Thomson, Stephen Duck, and Mary Collier, and makes a close analysis of one of the largely forgotten didactic epics of the eighteenth century, John Dyer's The Fleece. Through an exploration of the purpose of rural poetry and how it relates to the real world, Goodridge breaks through the often brittle surface of eighteenth-century poetry, to show how it reflects the ideologies and realities of contemporary life.







The Poetry of T.V. Reddy


Book Description

Join us on a poetic journey to the soul of India. The Poetry of T.V. Reddy is grounded in human struggles and unrest, social as well as psychological and depicts the varied shades of restlessness that is the order of modern times. He protests against the social ills and evils in a gripping way in his absorbing poetry. He paints his experiences in a characteristic choice diction and the different images that he has carved out of human life and nature make a deep impression on the minds of the readers and linger there. The poet takes the readers into the soul of India, the villages and rural life which are the backbone of the countryóthat speaks volumes of his commitment to rural element and makes people come alive in his poetry. Natural rhyme and rhythm of the poems creates the pleasing melody. Clarity of thought and lucidity of expression, splendid imagery and marvelous melody are the hallmarks of his poetry. -- Dr. P.V. Laxmiprasad, Editor T.V. Reddy is not only a poet of highly perceptive temperament but also an accomplished critic and novelist. His awesome ingenious insight into the purpose and meaning of life in a perceptive and intuitive way leads the reader to the invisible force meticulously driving the point that the spiritual region lying within a man offers solace, harmony and consolation par excellence. For Reddy often finds strong affinity in Indian soil and here, rural backdrop inspires him to cultivate niceties of life where rural-oriented background turns out religious for him. -- P.C.K. Prem, Authoritative critic on Indian English Poetry from Himachal Paradesh, India T.V. Reddy's poems have the earthly smear of sweat and blood. Images crystallized, come alive in subtle but strong words gaining a permanent place in the hearts of the readers. His pen moves carving lasting images in a simple and straight form without any pompous gimmicks in the name of modern craft. His art of highlighting even tiny specks into gigantic monuments and the quality of lyrical writing gives a sense of exhilaration bringing the varied themes alive before our eyes elevating the soul to a higher consciousness. T.V. Reddy is a poet in the true sense, who gives us the best of the poetry in Indian English. -- D.H. Kabadi, from his review of Melting Melodies in Poetcrit T.V. Reddy is a skilled poet who handles thoughts that compel recognition. He deals with wide ranging themes that are sensitively sketched. While many poems capture common human tendencies and susceptibilities, vanities and vagaries with a sharp realist eye, there are some that move on to the dramatization of a grander perspective of eternity intruding into time to seek to redeem it of its ravages. -- Prof. C.R.Visveswar Rao, Former Vice Chancellor, Vikrama Simhapuri University, Nellore, A.P., India; and currently the Chairman, Indian Society for Commonwealth Studies (ISCS) , New Delhi From Modern History Press www.ModernHistoryPress.com




Who Killed American Poetry?


Book Description

Throughout the 19th century, American poetry was a profoundly populist literary form. It circulated in New England magazines and Southern newspapers; it was read aloud in taverns, homes, and schools across the country. Antebellum reviewers envisioned poetry as the touchstone democratic genre, and their Civil War–era counterparts celebrated its motivating power, singing poems on battlefields. Following the war, however, as criticism grew more professionalized and American literature emerged as an academic subject, reviewers increasingly elevated difficult, dispassionate writing and elite readers over their supposedly common counterparts, thereby separating “authentic” poetry for intellectuals from “popular” poetry for everyone else.\ Conceptually and methodologically unique among studies of 19th-century American poetry, Who Killed American Poetry? not only charts changing attitudes toward American poetry, but also applies these ideas to the work of representative individual poets. Closely analyzing hundreds of reviews and critical essays, Karen L. Kilcup tracks the century’s developing aesthetic standards and highlights the different criteria reviewers used to assess poetry based on poets’ class, gender, ethnicity, and location. She shows that, as early as the 1820s, critics began to marginalize some kinds of emotional American poetry, a shift many scholars have attributed primarily to the late-century emergence of affectively restrained modernist ideals. Mapping this literary critical history enables us to more readily apprehend poetry’s status in American culture—both in the past and present—and encourages us to scrutinize the standards of academic criticism that underwrite contemporary aesthetics and continue to constrain poetry’s appeal. Who American Killed Poetry? enlarges our understanding of American culture over the past two hundred years and will interest scholars in literary studies, historical poetics, American studies, gender studies, canon criticism, genre studies, the history of criticism, and affect studies. It will also appeal to poetry readers and those who enjoy reading about American cultural history.







N-Z, pages 803-1,110


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Lower Hall


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