Description
Book SynopsisThis 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 chan
Trade ReviewThis book offers an original study of the reception/appropriation of the so-called Alcaic strophe in English-language poetry, and through deft close readings of several poems from the early modern period up to today rightly demonstrates that a neglect or ignorance of the use of classical metrics comes at the cost of a “dimension of poetic expressiveness”. -- Peter Liebregts, Professor of Modern Literatures in English, Leiden University, The Netherlands
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements 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
