The Alcaic Metre in the English Imagination

Talbot, John

Bloomsbury Academic（2024/01発売）

• 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版／ページ数 236 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781350232532
• DDC分類 821.04

Full Description

This book reveals how a remarkable ancient Greek and Latin poetic form -- the alcaic metre -- found its way into English poetry, and continues shaping the imagination of poets today. English poets have always admired the extraordinary beauty and intricacy of the alcaic stanza (Tennyson called it 'the grandest of all measures') and their inventive responses to the ancient alcaic have generated remarkable innovations in the rhythms, sounds and shapes of modern poetry. This is the first book-length study of this neglected strand of English literary history and classical reception.

Attending closely to the rhythm and texture of their verses, John Talbot reveals surprising connections between English poets across five centuries, among them Mary Shelley, Milton, Marvell, Tennyson, Edward FitzGerald, Wilfred Owen, W. H. Auden and Donald Hall. He gives special attention to a flourishing of English alcaics during the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and what it suggests about the changing place of classics and poetic form in contemporary culture.

Contents

Acknowledgements
Preface

1 Coming Late to Latin: Wilfred Owen, John Hollander
2 'A Marvel of Metrical Disruptions': The Alcaic Strophe Itself
3 'Blossom Again on a Colder Isle': Mary Sidney, Alfred Tennyson
4 'The Same, But Not the Same': Tennyson's In Memoriam Stanza
5 'The Ear Grows Dissatisfied': Robert Bridges, W. H. Auden

Afterword: From Inheritance to Quarry: The Alcaic in Postmodernity

Notes
Index
Bibliography