English Verse: Voice and Movement from Wyatt to Yeats, Volume 2Cambridge U.P., 1967 - 324 pages Every poet has a characteristic tone of voice, and his own rhythm. The author's chief interest is this 'sound poems make in the head', and his particular gift is to help us to hear what is going on in the individual poem, and to catch the poet's individuality. We also hear how each poet develops the forms his predecessors have used. In this way, we move from a consideration of single voices to the development of particular forms (like the couplet or blank verse) and the characteristics of whole periods. This book, then, has several uses. While verse as sound is its main concern, it can be read as an introductory history of English verse from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Since the author quotes generously, he also provides as he goes along an unhackneyed anthology in chronological order. In addition, he comments in detail on many of the poems, so that the book is a demonstration of the methods and uses of practical criticism. |
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... rhythm , whose musical connotations may be misleading , for there is no such thing as ' pure ' sound or rhythm in language . The way we feel how a poem ' goes ' is the resultant of many forces . What all poems have in common is that ...
... rhythm , whose musical connotations may be misleading , for there is no such thing as ' pure ' sound or rhythm in language . The way we feel how a poem ' goes ' is the resultant of many forces . What all poems have in common is that ...
Page 3
... rhythm , making it do what he wants ; he is not subserviently tapping the poem out on his fingers , ' making it scan ' . The next quatrain is obscure , and so are the following three lines . Wyatt has struggled to get the Italian into ...
... rhythm , making it do what he wants ; he is not subserviently tapping the poem out on his fingers , ' making it scan ' . The next quatrain is obscure , and so are the following three lines . Wyatt has struggled to get the Italian into ...
Page 127
... rhythm of the dance , both ball and sabbath , whose circular movement is ' artful to no end ' . Still round and round the ghosts of beauty glide And haunt the places where their honour died . The exquisitely modulated vowels are an ...
... rhythm of the dance , both ball and sabbath , whose circular movement is ' artful to no end ' . Still round and round the ghosts of beauty glide And haunt the places where their honour died . The exquisitely modulated vowels are an ...
Contents
Blank Verse | 25 |
The Seventeenth Century | 58 |
The Eighteenth Century | 117 |
Copyright | |
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Common terms and phrases
A. E. Housman alliteration Balaam beauty Blake blank verse Boston Evening Transcript breath called Comus couplet dark dead death Donne Donne's doth dramatic dream Dryden earth eternal eyes fall feel flowers Gorboduc GUIDERIUS hath hear heart heaven Henry Purcell heroic couplet Hopkins human imagination inscape Keats kind King lady lines living look Lord lyric man's meaning melody Milton mind Muses nature nature's never night o'er passage play pleasure poem poet poet's poetic poetry Pre-Raphaelite Prufrock quotation reader rhetoric rhyme rhythm romantic Samian wine sense Shakespeare sing sleep smile song sonnet sort soul sound speech Spenser spirit spring sprung rhythm stanza stresses sweet syllables symbol T. S. Eliot taste thee theme thine things thou thought trees truth tune turn verb voice wind words Wordsworth writing Yeats