Description

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Overall very good and clean. Includes review of the book. With author dedication to Wolfgang Haase. - Allusion to the words and phrases of ancestral voices is one of the hidingplaces of poetry�s power. Poets appreciate the great debts that they owe to previous poets, and are often duly and newly grateful. Allusion to the Poets consists of twelve essays�four published here for the first time�on allusion and its relations, in particular on the use that poets in English have made of the very words of poets in English. The first half of the book, on �The Poet as Heir�, consists of six chapters devoted to individual poets, Augustan, Romantic, and Victorian: Dryden and Pope, Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and Tennyson. Allusion is always a form of inheritance, not to be hoarded or squandered. The critical and creative question is its imaginative co-operation with other kinds of legacy�with whatever for a particular poet or for a particular time is judged to be an unignorable inheritance: of a throne, perhaps, or of land; of intermixed languages; of the human senses; of money; of literature itself; or of our planet, long-lived but not eternal. The second half of the book is six essays on allusion�s affiliations: to plagiarism (allusion being plagiarism�s responsible opposite); to metaphor (allusion being a form that metaphor may take); to loneliness in poetry (allusion constituting company). And on allusion within poetry to prose (A. E. Housman); on translation as exercising allusion (David Ferry); and on the clash between one poet�s practice and his critical principles (Yvor Winters). - Christopher Ricks is Warren Professor of the Humanities and Co-Director of the Editorial Insitute at Boston University. His many OUP books include Becktt's Dying Words, Essays in Appreciation, The Force of Poetry, The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, and The Oxford Book of English Verse. ISBN 9780199250325