Author | Allen Tate |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | essays |
Publisher | Swallow Press |
Publication date | February 21, 1967 [1] |
Publication place | United States |
Pages | 640 |
Essays of Four Decades is a 1967 essay collection by the American writer Allen Tate. It is divided into five sections. The first consists on texts about modern poetry in general. The second focuses on individual writers, including John Donne, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, W. B. Yeats, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound and Herbert Read. The third consists of essays about imagination and critical reception. The fourth is about the Southern United States. The fifth consists of prefaces to some of Tate's previous books. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
The book consists of the following texts. [7]
I
II
III
IV
V
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist and playwright. He is considered to be one of the 20th century's greatest poets, as well as a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. His use of language, writing style, and verse structure reinvigorated English poetry. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often re-evaluated long-held cultural beliefs.
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a collaborator in Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his 800-page epic poem The Cantos.
Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism has been termed "a succession of creative moments" rather than a continuous or sustained period of development. The French academic René Taupin remarked that "it is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principles".
Amy Lawrence Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school. She posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.
Harold Hart Crane was an American poet. Inspired by the Romantics and his fellow Modernists, Crane wrote highly stylized poetry, often noted for its complexity. His collection White Buildings (1926), featuring "Chaplinesque", "At Melville's Tomb", "Repose of Rivers" and "Voyages", helped to cement his place in the avant-garde literary scene of the time. The long poem The Bridge (1930) is an epic inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge.
The Oxford University Press published a long series of poetry anthologies, dealing in particular with British poetry but not restricted to it, after the success of the Oxford Book of English Verse (1900). The Oxford poetry anthologies are traditionally seen as 'establishment' in attitude, and routinely therefore are subjects of discussion and contention. They have been edited both by well-known poets and by distinguished academics. In the limited perspective of canon-formation, they have mostly been retrospective and well-researched, rather than breaking fresh ground.
Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases of the critic setting the dates. The critic/poet C. H. Sisson observed in his essay Poetry and Sincerity that "Modernity has been going on for a long time. Not within living memory has there ever been a day when young writers were not coming up, in a threat of iconoclasm."
Denis Donoghue was an Irish literary critic. He was the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters at New York University.
Helen Vendler was an American academic, writer and literary critic. She was a professor of English language and history at Boston University, Cornell, Harvard, and other universities. Her academic focus was critical analysis of poetry and she studied poets from Shakespeare and George Herbert to modern poets such as Wallace Stevens and Seamus Heaney. Her technique was close reading, which she described as "reading from the point of view of a writer".
Ego Dominus Tuus, Latin for "I am your lord", sometimes translated as "I am your master", is a poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. It was published in the 1918 book Per Amica Silentia Lunae, where it introduced some of Yeats's essays, and collected with other poems in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919). The title is taken from Dante's La Vita Nuova: the words "ego dominus tuus" are spoken to Dante in a dream by the personification of Love. The two characters of the poem, Hic and Ille, are Latin words meaning this man and that man, respectively. Ezra Pound identified Ille with 'Willie', or Yeats: the poem covers many characteristic themes of Yeats, in particular the image of the mask and the concept of the double or "anti-self". The dialogue of Hic and Ille treats the poetry of Dante, John Keats, and Yeats himself, contrasting the words of each poet with the experience of their lives.
The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry is a 1947 collection of essays by Cleanth Brooks. It is considered a seminal text in the New Critical school of literary criticism. The title contains an allusion to the fourth stanza of John Donne's poem, "The Canonization", which is the primary subject of the first chapter of the book.
"A Defence of Poetry" is an unfinished essay by Percy Bysshe Shelley written in February and March 1821 that the poet put aside and never completed. The text was published posthumously in 1840 in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments. Its final sentence expresses Shelley's famous proposition that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
White Buildings was the first collection (1926) of poetry by Hart Crane, an American modernist poet, critical to both lyrical and language poetic traditions.
'Poetry as Confession' was an influential 1959 article written by M. L. Rosenthal, reviewing the poetry collection Life Studies by Robert Lowell. The review is credited with being the first application of the term of confession to an approach to the writing of poetry. This led to an entire movement of 20th Century poetry being called 'Confessional poetry'. The article was published in The Nation on 19 September 1959, and was later collected in Rosenthal's book of selected essays and reviews, Our Life In Poetry (1991). Some material from the essay was used in an essay Rosenthal published the following year in his book The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction.
Rosa Jamali is an Iranian poet, translator, literary critic, and playwright.
In Defense of Reason is a three-volume work of literary criticisms by the American poet and literary critic Yvor Winters. First published in 1947, the book is known for its meticulous study of metrical verse and for its examples of Winters' system of ethical criticism.
Keith Alldritt is a contemporary British novelist, biographer and critic.
"Ode to the Confederate Dead" is a long poem by the American poet-critic Allen Tate. It was first published in The American Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature in 1927, and then collected in Tate's first book of poems, Mr. Pope and Other Poems, in 1928. It is one of Tate's best-known poems and considered by some critics to be his most important. Heavily influenced by the work of T. S. Eliot, this Modernist poem takes place in a graveyard in the South where the narrator grieves the loss of the Confederate soldiers buried there. However, unlike the "ode" to the Confederate dead written by the 19th-century American poet Henry Timrod, Tate's "Ode" is not a straightforward ode. Instead, Tate uses the graveyard and the dead Confederate soldiers as a metaphor for his narrator's troubled state of mind, and the poem charts the narrator's dark stream of consciousness, as he contemplates his own mortality.
The Spirit of Romance is a 1910 book of literary criticism by the poet Ezra Pound. It is based on lectures he delivered at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London between 1908 and 1909 and deals with a variety of European literatures. As with Pound's later, unfinished poem The Cantos, the book follows "a pattern, at once historical and atemporal, of cultural beginnings and rebeginnings".