Singing Masters: Poets in English, 1500 to the PresentUniversity of Michigan Press, 1999 - 261 páginas "Singing Masters" is a book for connoisseurs of poetry. It spans five centuries of verse in English, but it is in no way a literary history or encyclopedic survey of the genre. It is instead a celebration of the poetry that has most delighted, engaged, and challenged one man over his long and distinguished career as literary scholar and critic. Russell Fraser's focus is on seventeen poets, including chapters on Donne, Herrick, Wordsworth, Milton, Shelley, and Marvell, with reference to many other poets along the way. The effort is not to be comprehensive, or even chronological (as the author points out, poetry, unlike the sciences, does not get better and better), but to record the impact of poetry on one man's sensibility, necessarily different from anyone else's. The account is personal--the distillation of a lifetime's experience. However, paying close attention to previous critics, "Singing Masters" is not impressionistic. The title comes from Yeats, a poet who wanted his predecessors to be the "singing masters" of his soul. Similarly, author Russell Fraser pays homage to his predecessors among the major critics. He doesn't read his poets in a vacuum, but locates them in their lives and times while simultaneously focusing on the work itself. In this book, the poem is the thing, and the basic questions explored are language-centered: what kind of poem is before the reader and whether it succeeds and why. Russell Fraser is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Michigan, where he held the Austin Warren Chair in English Literature and Language from 1983-95. He is the author or editor of sixteen books, including a two-volume biography of Shakespeare; a biography of R. P. Blackmur; "The Dark Ages and the Age of Gold; The Language of Adam: On the Limits and Systems of Discourse; Shakespeare's Poetics"; and "The Three Romes." |
Índice
Shakespeare at Sonnets | 3 |
Sex and Science in Donne | 20 |
Herrick among the Goths | 39 |
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anaphora Appleton House Arnold Astrophil Augustan poetry beauty better blank verse Coleridge comes couplet Coy Mistress critics death Donne Donne's Dryden earth elegy English epigrams Faerie Queene famous feeling Frost gives hear heart Heaven Herbert hero heroic couplet Herrick intellectual ipse dixit Jonson kind less lives look lovers Lycidas Marvell Marvell's meaning meant metonymy Milton mind mistress modern Muse nature never perhaps phrase plays poem poem's poet poet's poetry's Pope Pope's praise Professor X prose questions readers rhetorical rhyme Romantic says seems sense sexual Shakespeare Shelley Sidney Sidney's sing song sonnets soul Spenser stanza style sweet T. S. Eliot tells thee things thou thought Tintern Abbey tion truth turns virtue voice Wallace Stevens words Wordsworth wrote Yeats Yeats's