Collected Poems (Salt Modern Poets) - Hardcover

Kenneth Allott; Michael Murphy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1844714888 ISBN 13: 9781844714889

Publisher: Salt Publishing, 2008

Synopsis

Kenneth Allott was born in Glamorgan and educated in Newcastle and Oxford. Widely regarded as one of the most promising poets of the late Thirties, he published just two volumes in his lifetime, Poems (Hogarth Press, 1938) and The Ventriloquist's Doll (The Cresset Press, 1942). A posthumous Collected Poems (Secker & Warburg, 1975) gathered his earlier publications with a selection of unpublished work, edited by Miriam Allott and Roy Fuller. In Michael Murphy's new annotated edition of the Collected Poems all Allot's previously published work is combined with eighteen new poems, some of which have only recently come to light, the whole collection is introduced and annotated by Murphy and now represents the most complete picture of one of the UK's most compelling war time poets. Allott held a position at Liverpool University from 1948 until the time of his death in 1973. Allott's wife succeeded him as Chair in Modern English, and in 1978 established the Kenneth Allott Lecture in Poetry. This Collected Poems is published in 2008, the thirtieth anniversary of the Lecture and the year in which Liverpool is designated the European Capital of Culture.

About this title

About the Author

Kenneth Allott (1912-1973) was a leading poet of the Thirties generation, publishing two collections of poetry: Poems (1938) and The Ventriloquist's Doll (1943). He was also the editor of the highly influential Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse (1950, rev. 1962). His Collected Poems has been out of print for a number of years, and this updated and revised new edition includes a significant number of poems either previously unpublished or not reprinted. Michael Murphy is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Allottments (2008), and his poems are included in The New Irish Poets. He is the author of a number of critical studies, including Writing Liverpool?:?Essays and Interviews (edited with Deryn Rees-Jones, 2007) and Proust and America (2007). He teaches at Nottingham Trent University and lives in Liverpool.

Review

His poetry [is] original and personal in a way rare among young poets in any period but perhaps particularly in the 1930s. [F]ew poets in this century have written consistently with such wit and feeling, such natural elegance and style. -- Julian Symons * Times Literary Supplement * A powerful apocalyptic ... tone predominates, yet identifiable fragments of late-Thirties society can still be discerned, churning around in the echo-chamber of Allott's imagination ... at which moments the effect is something like MacNeice's bagpipe music rescored for cellos and muffled drums. -- Russell Davies * New Statesman * His amphibious intelligence, moving between creativity and scholarship, [makes me] think of him as an example of a man who proved how illusory was Yeats' proffered choice between `perfection of the life or of the work.' -- Seamus Heaney

About this edition

• Publisher: Salt Publishing
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1844714888
• ISBN 13: 9781844714889
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 208