A Little History of Poetry by John Carey

Abstract

MLR, .,   field of expertise with the third quarter of the book being devoted solely to Goethe. is is hardly inappropriate, given Goethe’s status as one of the very few writers in world literature to have an entire epoch named aer them (‘Goethezeit’). As Reed also remarks, there is less of a gap between modern German writers and the texts of antiquity and early modernity treated in the first half of his book: even Bertolt Brecht named the Bible as an inspirational text for his style (p. ). Covering Faust, the lyric poetry, and Young Werther and Wilhelm Meister respectively, Reed explores Goethe’s lifelong habit of reworking, revising, and developing some of his most famous works, paying detailed attention to the entanglements of his personal and professional writing life. e final part of Genesis considers nineteenth- and twentieth-century German literature, specifically works by Georg Büchner, omas Mann, Franz Kaa, Brecht, Paul Celan, and Christa Wolf, neatly dramatizing the struggles and successes of their (sometimes foreshortened) literary careers. As Reed admits in his Preface, Genesis ‘casts a wide net for a limited haul—the studies are small in number when set against the infinite corpus of literary works whose every genesis might be reconstructed ’ (p. xi). Nevertheless, Reed’s selection is representative of many authors, many epochs, many genres, and many locations. And, as he rightly observes, ‘even if we can only get to know a few works in genetic detail, we can see in these the embodiment of a constant principle that alters our feeling for whatever we read. Every text will come to life in a fresh way’ (p. ). Reed’s essays—for this book could easily and profitably be dipped into as an essay collection—offer refreshing, invigorating readings; they are consistently pithy, insightful, and deeply rooted in rigorous scholarship lightly worn. M  N I E A Little History of Poetry. By J C. New Haven: Yale University Press. .  pp. £. ISBN ––––. John Carey’s Little History of Poetry, which is just over  pages, is an immensely ambitious project that seeks to tell us about all significant poetry in the history of literacy. An ancient narrative, e Epic of Gilgamesh, is Carey’s starting point. It is a strange story which is possibly a kind of founding epic (but that point is not insisted on). Carey brings out its parallels with Homer’s Odyssey. is light touch contrasts with the systematic aesthetic and cultural history displayed in Stephen Greenblatt’s e Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (London: Bodley Head, ; reviewed in MLR,  (), –), which compares Gilgamesh with the biblical creation story and links them with Milton’s Paradise Lost and with Michelangelo’s decoration of the Sistine Chapel. Gilgamesh is a text for the learned. William Empson was a fan of Gilgamesh, and Empson’s own poetry is very learned indeed. Sadly, he is not mentioned in this history. e wit and playfulness of ‘Sleeping out in a College Cloister’, the tenderness of ‘To an Old Lady’, and the intellectual density of ‘Bacchus’, ‘High  Reviews Dive’, and ‘Legal Fiction’ could well have earned him a place in this book. e strength of his poetry is not in doubt. Christopher Ricks’s big chapter on Empson in e Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), pp. –, is especially persuasive. e literary history as presented in this book is clear and direct. e ancient classical epic poets, Homer and Virgil, underpinned and defined Greek and Roman culture. In later cultures, poetry found new roles. Following the achievement of the Anglo-Saxon poets (especially the Beowulf poet), Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton each reinvented the nature of poetry. Subsequent giants in the English language, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Kipling, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, and Dylan omas, continued the process of enlarging our understanding of what poetry is and what it can do. e more recent the poet the more biographical information is available. is lends depth to the sketches of poets who were women, or working-class, or homosexual, as well as those who were addicted, disempowered, or mentally or physically ill. Coleridge, Keats, Emily Brontë, Wilde, Hopkins, Hardy, Whitman, Dickinson, Crane, Auden, Bishop...