The Later Affluence of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens - Hardcover

Clarke, E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0230296688 ISBN 13: 9780230296688

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Synopsis

Surveying the later work of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, Edward Clarke unfolds their very last poems and considers the two poets' relations with western literature and tradition. This book shows how these two latecomers transform the ways in which we read earlier poets.

About this title

About the Author:

EDWARD CLARKE tutors visiting students in English literature at St Catherine's College, Oxford University, UK. He has published work in the Wallace Stevens Journal, and contributed to Essays and Reflections on John Berryman (2006) and The Greenwood Encyclopaedia of American Poetry and Poetics (2006).

Review:

'This rewarding new study...adds genuine insight to the reading of both poets' late work, and will be valuable to students and scholars alike...the readings are finely judged, nuanced, and draw widely from deep currents of the Western poetic/biblical tradition... alive to the higher aspirations and skill of the poetry, and acutely aware too of criticism's requirement...to find a mode of self-consciousness which will...release reading into forms of surprise, expectation, and learning...The reading of Stevens's 'Not Ideas' is one of the finest I have encountered.' - Tim Morris, MLR

'This study...offers...a bold approach to critical reading that places a desire for spiritual and...existential awareness...at the centre of every reading, predicated on a rejection of modern scepticism. [Clarke's] passion is both provoking and...alluring...and it is on these terms that we need to meet this book. You might not always agree with it, but you'll be swept along regardless by its bravura and its seriousness: and in this way the book comes to model those most bold, and at times infuriating, of poets with whom it is so passionately concerned.' - Tara Stubbs, Irish Studies Review

'Clarke's book will infuriate readers anxious to get rid of the pseudo-homiletic tone from literary criticism, but it will also please others who turn to poetry to give a voice to the elusive movements of their souls. Many of us will shake with uncontrollable fear as we approach death; at that time, we will need to hear words, whispered in our ears, that will tell us of last things, as well as the first things that will paradoxically follow them. It is good that Edward Clarke reminds us who will do the whispering.' - Justin Quinn, Wallace Stevens Journal

'Clarke is good...on the dialectical irony of Yeats's "The Tower", where he finely notes the difficult movement, "dramatic, born of conflict", towards Yeats's statement that "Death and life were not / Till man made up the whole"... The driven idiosyncrasy of Clarke's approach might be admirable, but this is not a book that one can easily recommend.' - Vidyan Ravinthiran, TLS

'Clarke's The Later Affluence offers detailed and extended readings of the later poetry of Yeats and Stevens together. He seeks to uncover their different relations to earlier poets...This is indeed an ambitious study, which moves from Dante to Heidegger to Herbert to Virgil in the course of its readings. Moreover, the personal investment clearly integral to Clarke's readings is substantiated by certain keenly made points regarding modern critical trends.' - Review of English Studies

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0230296688
• ISBN 13: 9780230296688
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 262