Reading 20 Century Poetry The Language Of Gender And Objects - LARRISSY

The author details and distinguishes how different English, Irish and American poets have interpreted their relationship to romanticism and modernism. What emerges is a survey of how various romantic themes and impulses have evolved through the 19th and 20th centuries. The quick succession with which first God, and then the poet/observer have "disappeared" from notions of poetic truth, to be replaced in the era of Eliot and Pound with sceptical irony and tight-lipped celebration of the "objective", forms the author's background to the modern poetic tradition. Empiricism, alienation and the pecularity of things are themes that characterize the attitudes and voices of poets as diverse as Larkin, Davie, Plath, Heaney and Raine. The book distinguishes between their different approaches to the role of things and perception in poetry, and places this strand alongside detailed considerations of myths, post-modernism and possible future directions for contemporary poetry.;The work should appeal to students and teachers of English and poetry, as well as some some general readers.