Poetic Form : An Introduction

Michael D. Hurley and Michael O'Neill offer a perceptive and illuminating look into poetic form, a topic that has come back into prominence in recent years. Building on the renewed interest in form, Hurley and O'Neill provide an accessible and comprehensive introduction that will be of help to undergraduates and more advanced readers of poetry alike. The book sees form as neither ornamenting nor mimicking content, but as shaping and animating it, encouraging readers to cultivate techniques to read poems as poems. Lively and wide-ranging, engaging with poems as aesthetic experiences, the book includes a long chapter on the elements of form that throws new light on troubling terms such as rhythm and meter, as well as a detailed introduction and accessible, stimulating chapters on lyric, the sonnet, elegy, soliloquy, dramatic monologue, and ballad and narrative.

Michael D. Hurley combines a wide and interdisciplinary record of publishing in poetry and poetics with considerable experience as a teacher of close reading and practical criticism at Cambridge. His work is marked by an ambition to explore the relationship between what literature makes us feel and how it makes us think. His recent book on G. K. Chesterton was praised by one critic for being 'striking in the precision of its formal analysis and the elegance of its prose'.

Michael O'Neill is a well-known critic of poetry whose writings include monographs on Shelley (1989), Romanticism and the self-conscious poem (1997) and the twentieth- and twenty-first century literary legacies of Romantic poetry (2007). He edited the Cambridge History of English Poetry (2010) and a much-praised anthology of Romantic poetry with detailed comments on poetic form (2008). He has published two collections of poems and received a Cholmondeley Award for Poets in 1990. His work has been celebrated by many critics for its sensitivity to poetry and its ability to find an answerable language for poetic effects.