ISBN: PB: 9780300255034
ISBN: HB: 9780300232226
February 2021
320 pp.
21,6x14,0 cm
40 black&white illus.
PB:
£10.99
QTY:
HB:
£15.99
QTY:
Little History of Poetry
What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work – over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not.
John Carey tells the stories behind the world's greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem "great" in the first place. This little history shines a light on the richness and variation of the world's poems – and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.
John Carey tells the stories behind the world's greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem "great" in the first place. This little history shines a light on the richness and variation of the world's poems – and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.
About the author
John Carey is emeritus professor at the University of Oxford. His recent titles include "100 Poets: A Little Anthology" and "A Little History of Poetry". John Carey has been reviewing two books per month for the Sunday Times since the mid-1970s.