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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...
Studies the role that etymologies and etymological thinking have played in the works of English language poets including Seamus Heaney, R. F. Langley, J. H. Prynne, Geoffrey Hill, and Paul Muldoon.
Through close readings of the poems and prose essays of Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill, Defending Poetry makes a timely intervention in current debates about literature's ethics, arguing that any ethics of literature ought to take into account not only poetry, but also the writings of poets on the value of poetry.
Through readings of the poems & prose essays of Joseph Brodsky Seamus Heaney, & Geoffrey Hill, 'Defending Poetry' makes a timely intervention in current debates about literature's ethics, arguing that any ethics of literature ought to take into account not only poetry, but also the writings of poets on the value of poetry
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This book-length study of the poetry and critical writing of Geoffrey Hill, one of the major post-war writers in English, combines nuanced and incisive close reading with detailed scholarship and fresh archival work. Hill's work is examined in relation to the history of language and of the study of language, with key chapters dedicated to the linguistic ideas of the Oxford English Dictionary and its founder, Richard Chenevix Trench, and of scholar-poets GerardManley Hopkins and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The final two chapters consider the basis for a poetic theology of language founded in the myths of linguistic fallenness and original sin. In the range of itsattention and the depth of its scholarship, this book represents one of the fullest and most authoritative accounts of the work of a living writer in recent years.
WINNER OF THE McKITTERICK PRIZE 2022 'Madcap, hugely rich and entertaining' GQ 'Enjoyable, deft and humorous' The Times 'Entertaining, acute and remarkably prescient' TLS 'A book from the psychic fault-lines of 21st Century Britain . . . simultaneously down to earth and epic' Johny Pitts, author of Afropean Peterdown, an industrial town with a noble past and a lacklustre present, has been chosen as the regional hub of Britain's first state-of-the-art bullet train network. High Speed+ promises the town a prosperous future but to make way for the new station, a local landmark will be have to be razed to the ground. On the shortlist are the Larkspur housing estate, a significant modernist maste...
In Gratitude for All the Gifts explores the literary and cultural links between the bestselling, Nobel Prize-winning Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney and the preeminent Eastern European poets of the twentieth century, including fellow Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert. Magdalena Kay opens new ground in comparative literary studies with her close analysis of Heaney's poetic work from the perspective of the English-speaking West's attraction, and especially Heane''s own attraction, to Eastern European poetry. While placing Milosz and Herbert in their cultural contexts and keeping an eye on the poems in their original Polish, this innovative and energetic study focuses on how Heaney encountered their work in translation. In Gratitude for All the Gifts thus allows us to see what happens when poetic forms, histories, and themes travel between countries and encourages us to understand cultural crossing not just thematically, but also in terms of form, voice, and aesthetic intent.