The Etymological Poetry Of W H Auden J H Prynne And Paul Muldoon

This book defines, analyses, and theorises a late modern 'etymological poetry' that is alive to the past lives of its words, and probes the possible significance of them both explicitly and implicitly. Close readings of poetry and criticism by Auden, Prynne, and Muldoon investigate the implications of their etymological perspectives for the way their language establishes relationships between people, and between people and the world. These twin functions of communication and representation are shown to be central to the critical reception of etymological poetry, which is a category of 'difficult' poetry. However resonant poetic etymologising may be, critics warn that it shows the poet's natural interest in language degenerating into an unhealthy obsession with the dictionary. It is unavoidably pedantic, in the post-Saussurean era, to entertain the idea that a word's history might have any relevance to its current use. As such, etymological poetry elicits the closest of close readings, thus encouraging readers to reflect not only on its own pedantry, obscurity, and virtuosity, but also on how these qualities function in criticism. As well as presenting a new way of reading three very different late modern poet-critics, this book addresses an understudied aspect of the relationship between poetry and criticism. Its findings are situated in the context of literary debates about difficulty and diction, and in larger cultural conversations about the workings of language as a historical event.

This book defines, analyses, and theorises a late modern 'etymological poetry' that is alive to the past lives of its words, and probes the possible significance of them both explicitly and implicitly. Close readings of poetry and criticism by Auden, Prynne, and Muldoon investigate the implications of their etymological perspectives for the way their language establishes relationships between people, and between people and the world. These twin functions of communication and representation are shown to be central to the critical reception of etymological poetry, which is a category of 'difficult' poetry. However resonant poetic etymologising may be, critics warn that it shows the poet's natural interest in language degenerating into an unhealthy obsession with the dictionary. It is unavoidably pedantic, in the post-Saussurean era, to entertain the idea that a word's history might have any relevance to its current use. As such, etymological poetry elicits the closest of close readings, thus encouraging readers to reflect not only on its own pedantry, obscurity, and virtuosity, but also on how these qualities function in criticism. As well as presenting a new way of reading three very different late modern poet-critics, this book addresses an understudied aspect of the relationship between poetry and criticism. Its findings are situated in the context of literary debates about difficulty and diction, and in larger cultural conversations about the workings of language as a historical event.

For centuries, investigations into the origins of words were entwined with investigations into the origins of humanity and the cosmos. With the development of modern etymological practice in the nineteenth century, however, many cherished etymologies were shown to be impossible, and the very idea of original 'true meaning' asserted in the etymology of 'etymology' declared a fallacy. Structural linguistics later held that the relationship between sound and meaning in language was 'arbitrary', or 'unmotivated', a truth that has survived with small modification until today. On the other hand, the relationship between sound and meaning has been a prime motivator of poems, at all times throughout history. The Life of Words studies a selection of poets inhabiting our 'Age of the Arbitrary', whose auditory-semantic sensibilities have additionally been motivated by a historical sense of the language, troubled as it may be by claims and counterclaims of 'fallacy' or 'true meaning'. Arguing that etymology activates peculiar kinds of epistemology in the modern poem, the book pays extended attention to poems by G. M. Hopkins, Anne Waldman, Ciaran Carson, and Anne Carson, and to the collected works of Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, R. F. Langley, and J. H. Prynne.

For centuries, investigations into the origins of words were entwined with investigations into the origins of humanity and the cosmos. With the development of modern etymological practice in the nineteenth century, however, many cherished etymologies were shown to be impossible, and the very idea of original 'true meaning' asserted in the etymology of 'etymology' declared a fallacy. Structural linguistics later held that the relationship between sound and meaning in language was 'arbitrary', or 'unmotivated', a truth that has survived with small modification until today. On the other hand, the relationship between sound and meaning has been a prime motivator of poems, at all times throughout history. The Life of Words studies a selection of poets inhabiting our 'Age of the Arbitrary', whose auditory-semantic sensibilities have additionally been motivated by a historical sense of the language, troubled as it may be by claims and counterclaims of 'fallacy' or 'true meaning'. Arguing that etymology activates peculiar kinds of epistemology in the modern poem, the book pays extended attention to poems by G. M. Hopkins, Anne Waldman, Ciaran Carson, and Anne Carson, and to the collected works of Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, R. F. Langley, and J. H. Prynne.

W. H. Auden is perhaps the most important English language poet of the 20th century. He produced marvelous poems-even in his last days.However, critics and reviewers not only have not recognized the aesthetics of the poetry Auden wrote after 1965, but they have ignored or made prejudiced and disparaging remarks about it, thus diverting subsequent critical (and popular) attention from its remarkable virtues. The aim of W. H. Auden's Poetry: Mythos, Theory, and Practice is to clarify Auden's career-long interest in poetic theory and, above all, to show how his changing thoughts about poetry impelled him towards the production of the last three volumes of his verse.Because it links the poet's biographia literaria and his aesthetic vision, this book will appeal to poets as well as to students of writing-particularly those interested in the creative process and its correlation to artistic forms. Students of 20th-century American and British literature will find in these pages a comprehensive survey of Auden's thoughts about his art and the poetry of his predecessors as well as of his contemporaries. Teachers of Auden's works will appreciate the strong light such a survey casts on Auden's poetic practice. Engineers and architects, physicists and biologists, cultural critics, social scientists, philosophers, and especially Gestalt psychologists might well enjoy reading about the ways their fields have intersected and influenced the thinking of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and courageous poets.

This book is not a "survey" or a guide to all or even most of Auden's poetry, though it does follow the general outlines of Auden's development as a poet and thinker."--BOOK JACKET.

The first of two volumes of the eagerly anticipated first complete edition of Auden’s poems—including some that have never been published before W. H. Auden (1907–1973) is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his reputation has only grown since his death. Published on the hundredth anniversary of the year in which he began to write poetry, this is the first of two volumes of the first complete edition of Auden’s poems. Edited, introduced, and annotated by renowned Auden scholar Edward Mendelson, this definitive edition includes all the poems Auden wrote for publication, in their original texts, and all his later revised versions, as well as poems and songs he never published, some of them printed here for the first time. This volume traces the development of Auden’s early career, and contains all the poems, including juvenilia, that he published or submitted for publication, from his first printed work, in 1927, at age twenty, through the poems he wrote during his first months in America, in 1939, when he was thirty-two. The book also includes poems that Auden wrote during his adult career with the expectation that he might publish them, but which he never did; song lyrics that he wrote to be set to music by Benjamin Britten, but which he never put into print; and verses that he wrote for magazines at schools where he was teaching. The main text presents the poems in their original published versions. The notes include the extensive revisions that he made to his poems over the course of his career, and provide explanations of obscure references. The second volume of this edition, Poems, Volume 2: 1940–1973, is also available.

The authors of these essays see Muldoon from many different angles - biographical, formal, literary-historical, generic - but are also engaged in directing attention to complex moments of creativity in which an extraordinary amount of originality is concentrated, and on the clarity of which a lot depends.

This significantly expanded edition of W. H. Auden’s Selected Poems adds twenty poems to the hundred in the original edition, broadening its focus to better reflect the enormous wealth of form, rhetoric, tone, and content in Auden’s work. Newly included are such favorites as “Funeral Blues” and other works that represent Auden’s lighter, comic side, giving a fuller picture of the range of his genius. Also new are brief notes explaining references that may have become obscure to younger generations of readers and a revised introduction that draws on recent additions to knowledge about Auden. As in the original edition, the new Selected Poems makes available the preferred original versions of some thirty poems that Auden revised later in life, making it the best source for enjoying the many facets of Auden’s art in one volume.