The Strength of Poetry: Oxford Lectures - Softcover

Fenton, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374528489 ISBN 13: 9780374528485

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002

Synopsis

Sharp-eyed critiques and appreciations of the essential poets of our time. James Fenton is unique among contemporary writers in having achieved equal distinction as a poet and -- in his reportage and criticism -- as a master of trenchant prose. What is more, he has shown himself a devoted critic of both American and British modern poetry, an explainer of each tradition to the other and to itself. In these lectures, delivered at Oxford (where he succeeded Seamus Heaney as Professor of Poetry from 1994 to 1999), Fenton moves easily from Philip Larkin's laments for the British Empire, to Heaney's uneasy rebellion against it, to Robert Frost's celebrations of American conquest; from W. H. Auden on Shakespeare's homoeroticism to the vexed "feminism" of Elizabeth Bishop; from Wilfred Owen's juvenilia to Marianne Moore's youthful agitation for women's suffrage.In these lectures -- many of which appeared in The New York Review of Books -- Fenton makes sense of the last century in poetry, and explores its antecedents and its legacies, with the lucidity, wit, and gusto that have made his criticism famous.

About this title

About the Author

The celebrated British poet and literary critic James Fenton has been a foreign correspondent and a theater critic and has written about the history of gardens.

From Publishers Weekly

The English poet and frequent New York Review of Books contributor Fenton (Out of Danger) succeeded Seamus Heaney in 1994 as Oxford University's Professor of Poetry. Like past holders of the prestigious post, Fenton gave a series of public lectures on topics in poetry and the other arts from artistic rivalry in the Renaissance, to Heaney's ambiguities and D.H. Lawrence's animals, to W.H. Auden's readings of Shakespeare and James. This volume collects 12 of the 15 Fenton delivered (many of which later appeared in the New York Review); all but the first focus on well-known 20th-century poets. His talks on Auden, Wilfred Owen and Larkin move easily among their famous poems, the materials of their biographies (including Larkin's mixed sympathies during World War II), the scholarship on their drafts and the assumptions about them that U.K. audiences have had. A talk on Marianne Moore looks beyond her later reputation for poetic modesty to see and hear, in her poems, an angry and political young woman. Another lecture shows how Plath but neither Bishop nor Moore considered herself first of all a woman poet, and how that vocation affected Plath's art. The lack of a philosophically acute take on modernism, on the one hand, and of a deep cognizance of all strands of American poetry from the last 20 years on the other, limits the insights throughout. But the book is very English in a manner Americans often crave attuned to traditions of amateurism, studiously casual even when most learned and scrupulous in prose style.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0374528489
• ISBN 13: 9780374528485
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272