Description
Book SynopsisThomas Prendergast's Poetical Dust offers a provocative and far-reaching analysis of Poets' Corner. Covering nearly a thousand years of political and literary history, the book examines the chaotic, sometimes fitful process through which Britain has consecrated its poetry and poets.
Trade Review"Prendergast's book evokes a cultural marketplace bustling with competing voices and stories, where poets (in their afterlives) struggle to be heard above the noise of diverse meaning-mongers and lobbyists." *
Times Literary Supplement *
"
Poetical Dust provides a bold and eye-opening history of Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner. Beginning with the deaths of Edward the Confessor and Thomas Becket, moving through Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Pope, and arriving in the present day, Thomas Prendergast examines how this revered architectural space has been critical to the formation of a British literary canon and, beyond that, British national identity." * David Haven Blake, author of
Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity *
Table of ContentsPreface
Introduction
Chapter 1. Westminster Abbey and the Incorporation of Poets' Corner
Chapter 2. Melancholia, Monumental Resistance, and the Invention of Poets' Corner
Chapter 3. Love, Literary Publicity, and the Naming of Poets' Corner
Chapter 4. Absence and the Public Poetics of Regret
Chapter 5. Poetic Exhumation and the Anxiety of Absence
Coda. Necromancy and the American Poets' Corner
Poets' Corner Graveplan
Poets' Corner Alphabetical Burial and Monument List
Chronological List of Stones and Monuments in the South Transept
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
