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Reviewed by: Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry John Corbett Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry. By Chris Jones. Pp. viii + 266. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hb. £50. This vigorous and engaging volume offers a series of close readings of the poetry of Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Edwin Morgan, and Seamus Heaney in support of an argument that the poetics of each owes a substantial debt to the Old English he was taught at university. The general survey of twentieth-century poetry that the volume's subtitle apparently implies, then, never quite materializes, though several other poets are mentioned in passing and the chapter on Edwin Morgan touches in more detail on Scots language translations of Old English poetry by Alexander Scott and Tom Scott. On the whole, though, Jones' claim that there is Anglo-Saxon DNA coursing through the blood of modern English poetry rests on the geographical variety and canonical status of these four poets – an American, Englishman, Scotsman, and Irishman – whose work spans much of the twentieth century, and indeed spills into the twenty-first. In the cases of Pound, Morgan, and Heaney the engagement with Old English poetry involves direct translation, in particular of the elegy The Seafarerand the epic Beowulf. With Auden the involvement is less direct, though the flavour of Anglo-Saxon verse suffuses works such as the early [End Page 265]play Paid on Both Sidesand the long poem The Age of Anxiety. Jones' discussions of all four poets, however, travel beyond straight translation and into the broader realm of poetic technique and subject matter. Thus, what Pound learns from his eccentric, foreignizing translation of The Seafarerserves him well when he comes to write the Cantos, Morgan's Anglo-Saxon translations lead us startlingly towards science fiction poems such as 'Off Course', and Heaney's fascination with Old English seeps into 'North' as much as it does into his much applauded (and also criticized) version of Beowulf. Jones' main thesis is that modern poetry is founded on and sustained by a philologically inspired poetics. These four influential figures were themselves influenced by the discovery, in Old English classes at university, of a set of rhetorical techniques that promised an alternative to the seemingly tired tradition of stress-syllabic rhyming verse. It is this that distinguishes the modern OE-translating poet from his Victorian and Edwardian predecessors. Generally speaking, nineteenth-century translators such as H. W. Lumsden, William Morris, and A. J. Wyatt sought through translation to reinscribe Old English verse into the anglophone canon – Lumsden by adopting the rollicking ballad metre thought suitable for a folk epic like Beowulf, Morris and Wyatt by fashioning a more overtly archaizing blank verse based on heavily alliterative anapaestic trimeter. From Pound onwards, however, Old English is used as a resource to refashion the contemporary canon – Jones links Pound's groundbreaking translation of The Seafarerto line 532 of the Cantos: 'to break the pentameter, that was the first heave'. One of the major strengths of Jones' book is the detail with which he supports Pound's claim that the forging of a new tradition lay in the reworking of an old one. As well as reviewing the case in favour of Pound's early familiarity and lifelong fascination with Old English verse, Jones painstakingly unpicks the cadences of the Cantos, showing how they echo Old English rhythms even when they break free of alliterative constraints: 'Hoping to effect a new, American-led renaissance, Pound's language for the Neukuiais not the mock-Old English of The Seafarerbut a modern version of it.' Jones argues that to the twentieth-century poets Old Engish did not signify an Ango-Saxon ethnic authenticity so much as a latent energy that could be tapped into to revive poetry in the modern idiom. He frequently returns, with variation, to the titular phrase 'strange likeness': since Old English is both foreign to and identical with present-day English, it functions as an ideal tool to defamiliarize and refresh contemporary poetry while linking it to an ancient tradition. In the case of Auden there is the...

Reviewed by: The Oxford Companion to Poetry in English Michael North The Oxford Companion to Poetry in English. Edited by Ian Hamilton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. 602. $35.00. This new book is a massive biographical dictionary with a few additional entries on “topics, movements, magazines, and genres” (v). The 1500 poets included make a suitably diverse group with substantial representation from Australia (120 poets), Canada (110), Africa (60), Asia (40), New Zealand (35), and the Caribbean (30), in addition to English and American delegations of about 550 each. Thus the volume makes good on its claim to represent twentieth-century poetry in English and not just twentieth-century English poetry, and this is an important distinction. Beyond this tally of names and nationalities, however, the Companion is a good deal less open and diverse. The number of “topics” included is not very great, and the treatment of “movements” and “genres” seems to show a definite bias. How companionable one finds this volume, then, is likely to depend a great deal on the extent to which one shares its taste in twentieth-century poetry. With 1500 individuals represented, it might seem that no one significant can have been left out, and this is very nearly the case. David Antin, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Robert Service are all missing, and yet the very diversity of this short list suggests that sheer accident is the only explanation for their omission. On the other hand, ignorance of Dunbar does allow Lewis Turco to say quite inaccurately of Langston Hughes that he was “the first American black to make a living as a writer” (240). And the fact that there are other possible candidates as well, [End Page 86] including William Stanley Brathwaite and Fenton Johnson, who are also omitted from the Companion, shows how thinly it has penetrated into African American poetry. Of the women poets of the Harlem Renaissance such as Georgia Douglas Johnson, Anne Spencer, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Angelina Grimke, none are included. Even the Harlem Renaissance writers who are covered are often described in terms so cursory as to be inaccurate. For example, Turco also claims that Hughes was the “first black American to write civil rights protest poetry that was identifiable as such” (241), a mistake that might have been avoided by timely reference to the entry in this volume on Claude McKay, whose fierce beadle of self defense, “If We Must Die,” was nationally known when Hughes was still in high school. In another curious entry, Turco says flatly of Jean Toomer that he “was not part of the Harlem Renaissance” (546), which oversimplifies, at the very least, the role of a poet who is listed as one of the “major figures” of the Harlem Renaissance elsewhere in this very volume (213). So little inspired is Turco by Toomer’s work itself that not one word of description or analysis is expended on it, merely an extreme case of the general practice in these entries, which are long on the life and short on the art. This may be just as well, since the critical terminology brought to bear on the African American poets is both peculiar and inconsistent. Robert Hayden, for example, is included along with Gwendolyn Brooks in a bizarre list of “postmodernist blacks,” though his own entry points out that he was “always a formal poet” (221). There is little in the entry on Brooks to suggest how she may have come to be classed as a postmodernist, especially since that entry focuses so heavily on subject matter as to miss her significant shift from received to experimental forms. This last omission, however, is merely one instance of a lack of interest in formal innovation widespread in the pages of the Companion. One of the few truly dismissive entries, beside that visited on the unfortunate Alfred Austin, is the one on Allen Ginsberg. “The recent surge of interest in formal verse,” we are told, has restricted Ginsberg’s influence to “ageing members of the New York School and San Francisco’s college radicals” (188). Even readers outside these two notorious intellectual fleshpots may have missed this “recent surge of interest in formal...

Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry. Chris Jones . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. x+266.

Twentieth Century Poetry in English: Contemporary Recordings of the Poets Reading Their Own Poems Selected and Arranged by the Consultants in Poetry in English at the Library of Congress and Issued under a Grant from the Bollingen Foundation. Album III

Twentieth Century Poetry in English: Contemporary Recordings of the Poets Reading Their Own Poems Selected and Arranged by the Consultants in Poetry in English at the Library of Congress and Issued under a Grant from the Bollingen Foundation. Album III

Twentieth Century Poetry in English: Contemporary Recordings of the Poets Reading Their Own Poems Selected and Arranged by the Consultants in Poetry in English at the Library of Congress and Issued under a Grant from the Bollingen Foundation, Album IV

Twentieth Century Poetry in English: Contemporary Recordings of the Poets Reading Their Own Poems Selected and Arranged by the Consultants in Poetry in English at the Library of Congress and Issued under a Grant from the Bollingen Foundation

Ira Nadel looks at the comparative literature milieu of Pound’s education at the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College in the first decade of the twentieth century. Pound believed that “only the classics can keep one free from the cant and vagueness found in [one’s] contemporaries.” He resolved that “to become modern was to absorb the ancients.” Nadel examines a number of Pound’s early poems (“Apparuit,” “Papyrus,” “Night Litany”), through quantity.” especially for their “metrical elements,” including quantitative Sapphic verse, classical musicality, “the classical reliance on allusion, citation and prosodic inventions,” fragments of lost Greek texts, and what Pound would later call “absolute rhythm,” in which a poem’s prosody “corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed, often through quantity.” The implementation of classical meters, as T. S. Eliot would observe, would distinguish Pound’s modernist verse from the poetry in English of both the recent past and the present. From the start Pound’s verse would locate the contemporary in the distant past of other cultures.

Twentieth-century poetry in English

Twentieth-century poetry in English

In 1995 the United States had a President who believed that poetry might be important enough to quote in public. That December, Bill Clinton visited Derry in Northern Ireland, and made a speech which culminated with a full quotation of what have become some of the best-known lines of later twentieth-century poetry in English:

Space, Place and Poetry in English and German 1960–1975 proposes that the impact of transnational spatial revolutions on twentieth-century poetry can only be fully grasped with recourse to comparative methodologies which look across national borders. It focuses on the period 1960–75, a key transitional phase between modernity and postmodernity and one which saw drastic changes in perceptions and experiences of space across both language areas. Examinations of representations of space and place in the poetry of this period have been frustratingly monolingual; Thomas argues current research has not yet fully exploited the potential of a space and place oriented approach to poetry of the 1960s and early 1970s, and that to do so requires a fundamentally comparative critical paradigm, exemplified here with reference to a range of Anglophone and German-language poets.

Twentieth-century poetry in English

Twentieth-century poetry in English

Twentieth-century poetry in English