Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry

Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry
ISBN-10
0191081914
ISBN-13
9780191081910
Category
Poetry
Pages
416
Language
English
Published
2016-08-25
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Authors
James Williams, Matthew Bevis

Description

Of all the Victorian poets, Edward Lear has a good claim to the widest audience: admired and championed by critics and poets from John Ruskin to John Ashbery, he has also been read, heard, and loved by generations of children. As a central figure in the literature of nonsense, Lear has also shaped the evolution of modern literature, and his work continues to influence and inspire writers and readers today. This collection of essays-the first ever devoted solely to Lear-builds on a recent resurgence of critical interest and asks how it is that the play of Lear's poetry continues to delight, and to challenge our sense of what poetry can be. These seventeen chapters, written by established and emerging critics of poetry, seek to explore and appreciate the playfulness embodied in the poems, and to provide contexts in which it can be better understood and enjoyed. They consider how Lear's poems play off various inheritances (the literary fool, Romantic lyric, his religious upbringing), explore particular forms in which his playful genius took flight (his letters, his queer writings about love), and trace lines of Learical influence and inheritance by showing how other poets and thinkers across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries played off Lear in their turn (Joyce, Stein, Eliot, Auden, Smith, Ashbery, and others).

Other editions

Similar books

  • Penguin's Poems for Life
    By Laura Barber

    ... Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, ... A Noiseless Patient Spider A noiseless patient spider, I mark'd where on a ...

  • Penguin's Poems by Heart
    By Laura Barber

    An anthology of some of the best English poems.

  • Scales of the Dragon
    By James Timberlake

    Combining journal entries, poetry and formal e-mails, these books celebrate the sights, sounds, flavors, (and the physical and mental strain), of crossing mountains, rolling landscapes, and unchanged rural villages, as well as vibrant ...

  • Upon This Stoney Holy Year
    By James Timberlake

    There are no Formal E-mails, no Definitions, no Autobiography or Research here. And because of all that it is not, this book completes those first two in the pilgrimage series in a gentle way.

  • Heaven Is My Real Home: Volume 1
    By Karen Freeman

    Karen Freeman! Was born August 22, 1950 in Newark New Jersey. She had a “BRIGHT” daughter named Kira. She Married Warren W. C. Freeman March 1, 1998. They were married for 13 years and 20 days. She “PASSED-ON” March 21, 2011.

  • Battle Dress: Poems
    By Karen Skolfield

    Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award "A terrific and sometimes terrifying collection—morally complex, rhythmic, tough-minded, and original." —Rosanna Warren, 2018 Barnard Women Poets Prize citation In a poetic voice at once accessible ...

  • Glossator 9: Pearl
    By Karl Steel, David Coley, Daniel Remein

    O. D. Macrae Gibson points out that the function of pyȝt as a concatenating word stresses its capacity to mean both arrayed and set.8 Gordon glosses the word as varying in sense throughout the poem between “set,” “fixed,” and “adorned” ...

  • The Truth
    By Karen Michelle Thompson

    This riveting poetry collection is a fresh and witty account of thoughts and experiences that everyday people have in their day-to-day lives.

  • Heart on Fire
    By Karen Teich Cluster

    SELL. IT. SOMEWHERE. ELSE. Well, you can take your good looks somewhere else Cuz they're not for sale 'round here... I've heard about you and the things you do And I don't need you anywhere near. Yeah, I've met your kind a time or two ...

  • Lerna, a Preclassical Site in the Argolid: Results of Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens
    By American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Jeremy B. Rutter, Elizabeth Banks

    I was indeed fortunate in being able to recruit a pair of talented , conscientious , and unfailingly cheerful draftsmen in the persons of Julie Baker and Kathi Donahue ( now Sherwood ) to collaborate with my wife , Sally , in producing ...