British & Irish Books - Page 4

Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology

Helen Vendler

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

As good as a poetry textbook could be 5 out of 5 stars.
21 of 23 people found this review helpful.

There may be something ominous to potential, non-student readers in the fact that this is a "textbook". What a bizarre thing! "Text" book. How is it different from a book? Well, it's a form of book that is meant to be taken very, very seriously because it is "required reading" for a required course and because it will help the worthy achieve mightily in the "standardized testing" they will have to take to prove themselves. Like most books, a "text" book has words in it, i.e. a text. We assumed that. The tautologous term "text" seems to have been added by some utterly pretentious, youth- despising pedant who wanted to quell and trample upon whatever inner happiness a kid may have felt at the propect of learning something new. A textbook about poetry is perhaps an oxymoron. Is there a standardized test for stirring of the soul or the soaring heart?

This is an excellent "book" book on poetry and art in general. In fact, it's one of my favorite books, and I've read alot. As soon as I finished it, I started at the beginning again. Except for the proposed questions for discussion or homework, there are very few "textbook" concessions. There is no talking down. It is intelligent and honest from beginning to end. In fact, having known many college age students in recent years nearly all of whom had the attention spans of mosquitoes, I wondered how far any would get in this book. It's too intelligent to serve as a modern textbook really.

But for people who love poetry, have hope invested in poetry, it's great. If you want to understand the basic elements of poetry, how it works, what it does that is diffeent from other arts, there can be no finer work.

Just as Browning read Johnson's Dictionary in preparation for a career as a poet, so I would imagine young poets and poetry lovers will in future read Professor Vendler.

Helen Vendler has an extraordinary ability to see clearly the basis of a poem, working back through the words, rhythms, intonations,and references to the pre-verbal experience the poet had that required expression. She has an intuitive intelligence that is oddly contagious. Sensing her remarkable ability to listen, one's own power to listen is enhanced: I too can puzzle back to the heart of this song and this experience. Our personal experience has a deep commonality. In other words, you can, after a while, learn the art of "close reading". It's a how-to book. And it's quite exciting, in a way, like suddenly being able to ride a bike on your own.

Finally, of course, it is a book about life. Poetry only exists as a communicative tool for interpreting the raw material, precious raw material, of life. One says Well, I'm alive so what do I need it for? Well, because we're not alive, we're semi-alive, brutally familiar with a very small part of life. So this being a book about great poetry addresses the great questions of life itself.

Paradise Lost (Oxford World's Classics)

John Milton

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Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Paradise Lost is the great epic poem of the English language, a tale of immense drama and excitement, of rebellion and treachery, of innocence pitted against corruption, in which God and Satan fight a bitter battle for control of mankind's destiny. The struggle ranges across heaven, hell, and earth, as Satan and his band of rebel angels conspire against God. At the center of the conflict are Adam and Eve, motivated by all too human temptations, but whose ultimate downfall is unyielding love. This marvelous new edition boasts an introduction by one of Milton's most famous modern admirers, the best-selling novelist Philip Pullman. Indeed, Pullman not only provides a general introduction, but also introduces each of the twelve books of the poem. In these commentaries, Pullman illuminates the power of the poem and its achievement as a story, suggests how we should read it today, and describes its influence on him and his acclaimed trilogy His Dark Materials, which takes its title from a line in the poem. His observations offer a tribute that is both personal and insightful, and his enthusiasm for Milton's language, skill, and supreme gifts as a storyteller is infectious. He encourages readers above all to experience the poem for themselves, and surrender to its enchantment. Pullman's tremendous admiration and passion for Paradise Lost will attract a whole new generation of readers to this classic of English literature. An ideal gift, the book is beautifully produced, printed in two colors throughout, illustrated with the twelve engravings from the first illustrated edition published in 1688, with ribbon marker.

William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books

William Blake

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In his Illuminated Books, William Blake combined text and imagery on a single page in a way that had not been done since the Middle Ages. For Blake, religion and politics, intellect and emotion, mind and body were both unified and in conflict with each other: his work is expressive of his personal mythology, and his methods of conveying it were integral to its meaning. There is no comparison with reading books such as Jerusalem, America, and Songs of Innocence and of Experience in Blake's own medium, infused with his sublime and exhilarating colors. Tiny figures and forms dance among the lines of the text, flames appear to burn up the page, and dense passages of Biblical-sounding text are brought to a jarring halt by startling images of death, destruction, and liberation. Blake's hope that his books would obtain wide circulation was unfulfilled: some exist only in unique copies and none was printed in more than very small numbers. Now, for the first time, the plates from the William Blake Trust's Collected Edition have been brought together in a single volume, with transcripts of the texts and an introduction by the noted scholar David Bindman. A major retrospective exhibition of Blake's work can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (March-June 2001). 400 color illustrations.

Includes:
Jerusalem
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
All Religions are One
There is No Natural Religion
The Book of Thel
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Visions of the Daughters of Albion
America a Prophecy
Europe a Prophecy
The Song of Los
Milton a Poem
The Ghost of Abel
On Homers Poetry [and] On Virgil
Laocoon
The First Book of Urizen
The Book of Ahania
The Book of Los

Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996

Seamus Heaney

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

He who makes English get up and dance... 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

If you have not read Seamus Heaney, then you are not in touch with what the English language is in its heart. Heaney's simple, unstrained word usage, coupled with a deep knowledge of the rich Anglo-Saxon which is our cornerstone, evokes a strength which comes not so much from what we see and know as from something which is rooted deeply in our psyches as Anglo-Europeans (or at least those living in and a part of such cultures). Heaney also brings to light the beauty of the ordinary, primarily by weighting it with the yoke of history and the various passions of his fellow man.

I bought this collection because I enjoyed others of his works (especially The Spirit Level and Seeing Things), which I uncovered at the library, too much to go long without his poetry. And this collection turns out to have all of my favorites from those volumes, as well as the best and most skilled of the poems of his earlier volumes. Do I recommend it? I wouldn't have prominently displayed the fact that I was reading it in numerous public places if I didn't, now would I?

Editorial Review:

As selected by the author, Opened Ground includes the essential work from Heaney's twelve previous books of poetry, as well as new sequences drawn from two of his landmark translations, The Cure at Troy and Sweeney Astray, and several previously uncollected poems. Heaney's voice is like no other--"by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive" (Helen Vendler, The New Yorker)--and this is a one-volume testament to the musicality and precision of that voice. The book closes with Heaney's Nobel Lecture: "Crediting Poetry."

The Riverside Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer, Larry Benson, Robert Pratt, F.N. Robinson

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Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

sitting on the dock of a bay... 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 13 people found this review helpful.

To gauge Chaucer's merit as a poet and as a HUMAN is in our time demanding and therefore questionable. Velleity MAY yield amusement. I will quote Ezra Pound:

"Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books for ever. ... As to the relative merits of Chaucer and Shakespeare, English opinion has been bamboozled for centuries by a love of the stage, the glamour of the theatre, the love of bombastic rhetoric and of sentimentalizing over actors and actresses; these, plus the national laziness and unwillingness to make the least effort, have completely obscured the values."

Pound the iconoclast. He does however wake one up to something beyond conjecture:

"Chaucer wrote when reading was no disgrace... Chaucer really does comprehend the thought as well as the life of his time... The Wife of Bath's theology is not a mere smear... 'conseilling is nat comandement.' Chaucer wrote while England was still a part of Europe. He was more compendious than Dante. ...Chaucer uses French art, the art of Provence, the verse art come from the troubadours. He is La Grand Translateur. He had found a new language, he had it largely to himself, with the grand opportunity. Nothing spoiled, nothing worn out. Dante had had a similar opportunity, and taken it, with a look over his shoulder and a few Latin experiments. ...Chaucer and Shakespeare have both an insuperable courage in tackling any, but absolutely any, thing that arouses their interest..."

It goes on and on. One CAN trace the metamorphoses of English verse. Its origin is with Chaucer.

Editorial Review:

This peerless new edition of Chaucer's complete works is the fruit of many years' study, and replaces Robinson's famous edition, long regarded as the standard text. Freshly edited and annotated, the "Riverside Chaucer" is now the indispensable edition for students and readers of Chaucer.

Complete Poems and Plays,: 1909-1950

T. S. Eliot

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Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Still Point of the Turning World 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

I'm not at all rating this book five stars; that's my rating for T.S. Eliot's plays. This book was the typical library edition and has everything wrong with it: the cover of an old, wise Eliot (why not a young maverick one?), "Complete" in the title when it's not at all complete, big, heavy, hardback and way too literary looking for the passing reader to crack the cover.

But look how much T.S. Eliot you already know. The Wasteland may be a maddingly obscure poem sequence built around a book by Jessie Weston, but Pete Townshend used the idea in a song: "Teenage Wasteland." You know from another song that T.S. Eliot, in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" said that life was measured out in coffee spoons. We all know that Old Possum's Book of Practical...plays out dramatically in a musical titled for the last word of that book...Cats. You could have tackled (or rather relaxed with) his most famous poem sequence, Four Quartets and the accompanying readers' guide by Thomas Howard.

But for all those bits of poetic imagery, you still might not stumble on the plays. I've never seen one of Eliot's plays put on, but they make wonderful reading. As an astute reviewer suggested, don't get this volume, which leaves out two of the five plays (or six if you include "Choruses from the Rock," which is not among the best). That reviewer also provided the helpful advice to track down the Faber edition which really does have all the plays. Some of them, notably Murder in the Cathedral, are available in single editions. But don't miss The Confidential Clerk, The Cocktail Party and The Elder Statesman for a great reading experience.

The only other play I know that reads this well is J. M. Barrie's original play of Peter Pan. Murder in the Cathedral is notable because it falls in the Church of England (Anglican) tradition of putting on plays at the Canterbury Festival. Charles Williams also wrote plays related to this event (Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury), as did Dorothy L. Sayers (The Zeal of Thy House, The Devil to Pay). All of which is to say that there is a lot of great dramatic writing to be rediscovered as reading as well as performance (see also my review of Christopher Fry's plays A Phoenix Too Frequent and The Lady's Not for Burning). Many Sayers readers are also aware that she wrote the first radio play for the BBC on the life of Jesus (and updated it to common language), as well as essays on her experience dealing with the Gospel accounts in dramatic form. The best known of these is "The Dogma is the Drama," available in various collections.

Editorial Review:

This omnibus collection includes all of the authorÂ’s early poetry as well as the Four Quartets, Old PossumÂ’s Book of Practical Cats, and the plays Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party.

Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford World's Classics)

Geoffrey Chaucer

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Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

misleading information 1 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

Your web-page is misleading. It quotes, and the image displays, the Middle English original of the poem. The inside pages shown are from the Middle English edition. However, (and the modernized title should be a giveaway, but it wasn't) the edition on this page is in modern English -- a translation, not Chaucer's poem. You need to clean up this page, take away the Middle English quotations, state that it's a modern translation, and refer the prospective buyer to the actual, modernized edition -- which the buyer may or may not want (in my case I did not), with assistance in finding the actual Middle English masterpiece.

Editorial Review:

Chaucer's masterpiece and one of the greatest narrative poems in English, the story of the lovers Troilus and Criseyde is renowned for its deep humanity and penetrating psychological insight. This is a modern English prose translation intended as an accurate guide to the Middle English original, and a readable translation in its own right. This edition includes an introduction by a major Chaucerean scholar, an index of the names associated with the Trojan War, and an illuminating index of Proverbs.

The Faerie Queene (Penguin Classics)

Edmund Spenser

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Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Penguin is best edition short of Hamilton's 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 15 people found this review helpful.

This is a review of The Faerie Queene, Penguin Classics edition, edited by Thomas Roche (ISBN 0140422072).

The Faerie Queene itself will not be to everyone's taste. It is probably easier than Milton, definitely harder than Malory, and parts of it are very accessible and parts of it are not very accessible at all. However, the language, which most will perceive as the primary barrier to Spenser's work, is not that difficult to get used to. Take Book I, Canto V, stanza 5, for example:

At last forth comes that far renowmed Queene,
With royall pomp and Princely maiestie;
She is ybrought vnto a paled greene,
And placed vnder stately canapee,
The warlike feates of both those knights to see.
On th'other side in all mens open vew
Duessa placed is, and on a tree
Sans-foy his shield is hangd with bloudy hew:
Both those the lawrell girlonds to the victor dew.

In line one, "renowmed" just means "renowned," and should be pronounced with three syllables: "re-nowm-ed," not "renowm'd." There is a difference.
In line two, the knowledge that Spenser typically uses "i" for "j" and "u" for v" is all readers need to read "majesty" for "maiestie." A passing acquaintance with Chaucer would help with line three, which features the Middle English prefix "y-" on "ybrought."
Line four: pronounce "placed" "plas-ed," not "plazd"; and just remember "v" means "u" for "vnder."
Line five presents no problems.
In line six, some readers might wonder why "the other" is contracted to "th'other." Here, a basic knowledge of English prosody is necessary. If Spenser had said "On the other side in all men's open view," he would have used eleven syllables, when his meter of choice, iambic pentameter, demands ten syllables. So he makes a contraction to stay within those ten syllables.
In line eight, Spenser writes "hangd" for the same reason: to stay within the ten syllables of iambic pentameter. If he had said "hanged," the sixteenth-century reader would have counted the syllables thus: "Sans-foy-his-shield-is-hang-ed-with-bloody-hue," which is eleven. Bear in mind that words such as "shield" are one syllable (sheeld), words such as "beauteous" are two syllables (beautyus), and words such as "disobedience" are three syllables (dis-o-bed-yence) for the purposes of scanning verse.

So much for Spenser's language. The content of the Faerie Queene might prove the greater barrier to the twenty-first century reader. If you don't like chivalry, knights, damsels in distress, hermits, and magicians, then you probably won't like the FQ. But if you are indeed blessed with a taste for "romance" in the old sense, then you should like Spenser. You might surprise yourself; a friend who doesn't read much old literature, and almost no poetry, read a few stanzas of the Faerie Queene and said she liked it. Granted, I don't know if she would have liked every bit of the entire thing. But in such a long poem, some parts will get boring. I loved Books I and II, didn't enjoy Book III as much, and then loved Books IV, V, and VI. Book V, with Artegall and his "Iron Man" who represents Justice, is quite good. And the Mutabilitie Cantos at the very end, as C.S. Lewis said, just might be "the finest thing in the whole work." But beware: the storyline is very, very complex. I found myself scanning previous cantos to recapture the plot line, which I'd lost track of. Be prepared to lose track of what's going on, unless you have an excellent memory or are used to old literature and complex plots.

Now for this particular edition. It's a very fat book (over 1,000 pages), and I wish it had been in two volumes (Penguin adopted that expedient in the Penguin Classics edition of Malory's Le Morte Darthur). Roche's text differs somewhat from A.C. Hamilton's standard edition of the Faerie Queene, but it's more than adequate for the non-scholarly reader. I found his notes extensive and very helpful. Spelling is barely modernized; Roche just changes the archaic long "s" to the modern one, leaving "v" for "u" (vnder) and "i" for "j" (maiestie) intact. Roche seems to be the best edition out there short of Hamilton, which costs about $55, and definitely the best for a first-timer. One recommendation: read Malory's Le Morte Darthur before the Faerie Queene. For one thing, if you don't like Malory, you probably won't like Spenser; and so reading Malory first could save you some time reading the FQ. If you do like Malory, then you probably will like Spenser; and reading Malory first accustoms you to knights and jousts and wizards and the typical machinery of Spenser. Also, knowing some Malory helps you catch some of Spenser's allusions to the Arthurian legend.

I give five stars to the Faerie Queene itself because I happen to love it; not everyone will share my opinion. I give five stars to Roche's edition because it's the best out there short of Hamilton, which not everybody needs.

Editorial Review:

"The Faerie Queene" was the first epic in English and one of the most influential poems in the language for later poets from Milton to Tennyson. Dedicating his work to Elizabeth I, Spenser brilliantly united medieval romance and renaissance epic to expound the glory of the Virgin Queen. The poem recounts the quests of knights including Sir Guyon, Knight of Constance, who resists temptation, and Artegall, Knight of Justice, whose story alludes to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Composed as an overt moral and political allegory, "The Faerie Queene", with its dramatic episodes of chivalry, pageantry and courtly love, is also a supreme work of atmosphere, colour and sensuous description.

English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology (Dover Thrift Editions)

William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A pretty good anthology 3 out of 5 stars.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful.

The price is certainly right. I used this book to teach a high-school poetry class. The selection of Blake is the weakest part of it: the selections from Innocence and Experience aren't ample enough to give a real sense for the book, and exclude some lyrics that I just couldn't do without (e.g. the "Holy Thursday" of Experience). The complete lack of notes (which originally I thought of as a plus :->) led to some unnecessary pain for students -- I remember one attempted close-reading of "The Extinction of the Venetian Republic" which toiled slowly through the poem, dealing with mysteries that wouldn't have been mysterious at all if there had been even a brief note on the political context of the poem.

On the plus side, there is not a bad poem in the whole book: every rift is loaded with ore. And it's an attractive paperback, nicely typeset, comfortable in the hands: it doesn't feel like a cheapo-cheapo book, which you'd rather expect from the price.

Editorial Review:

Rich selection of 123 poems by six great English Romantic poets: William Blake (24 poems), William Wordsworth (27 poems), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (10 poems), Lord Byron (16 poems), Percy Bysshe Shelley (24 poems) and John Keats (22 poems). Introduction and brief commentaries on the poets.

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

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Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A poet's eye 5 out of 5 stars.
19 of 20 people found this review helpful.

"Her terrace was the sand/And the palms and the twilight" -- and those are only the first two lines. Dipping into surrealism and imbued with spirituality, his poetry is compiled into "The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens," which includes seven compilations of his work.

Over his lifetime, Stevens wrote several books of poetry, but his exquisite poems are best taken by themselves: the lush grandeur of "Sunday Morning," the hymnlike "Le Monocle De Mon Oncle," and the humid grittiness of "O Florida, Venereal Soil." He takes multiple looks at "Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird," and the lush "Six Significant Landscapes."

In other poems, Stevens dips into outright surrealism, like in the delicate "Tattoo" ("There are filaments of your eyes/On the surface of the water/And in the edges of the snow"), and also adds a meditative bent into "The Snow Man" ("For the listener, who listens in the snow,/And, nothing himself, beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is").

If nothing else, Stevens' poetry can be read just because it is exquisitely beautiful. He lavished details all over almost every poem he wrote, and gave many of them the quality of a dream. His descriptions are simply written, but brilliantly laid out: "When my dream was near the moon,/The white folds of its gown/Filled with yellow light."

His style tends to be a bit on the ornate side -- Stevens freely uses the more exotic terms -- such as "opalescence," "pendentives" and "muleteers" -- wrapped up in complex verse, sometimes with a rhyme scheme and sometimes free-form. And lush detail is added to many of his poems, with descriptions of the moon, sun, plants and lighting, along with dazzling descriptions of the colors.

But his writing is more than beautiful. Stevens' work often poses questions about death, life, religion, and art, taking the conventional and turning it on its head. His belief in the importance of his art is reflected in poems like "Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself," which ends with the portentous lines: "Surrounded by its choral rings,/Still far away. It was like/A new knowledge of reality."

Wallace Stevens is one of the most unique poets of the 20th century, and the sprawling "Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens" is a wonderful read.

Editorial Review:

This definitive poetry collection, originally published in 1954 to honor Stevens on his 75th birthday, contains:

- "Harmonium"
- "Ideas of Order"
- "The Man With the Blue Guitar"
- "Parts of the World"
- "Transport Summer"
- "The Auroras of Autumn"
- "The Rock"