Description |
1 online resource (208 pages) |
Contents |
Prologue : seven poets and a peacock -- Male poets in proximity -- Lady Gregory's ideas -- Victorian adultery -- A woman's sonnets -- Alliances and rivalries -- The naked muse -- "a really important event" -- A live tradition -- Epilogue : the long peacock dinner |
Summary |
On January 18, 1914, seven male poets gathered to eat a peacock. W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, the celebrities of the group, led four lesser-known poets to the Sussex manor house of the man they were honouring, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: the poet, horse-breeder, Arabist, and anti-imperialist married to Byron's only granddaughter. In this story of the curious occasion that came to be known as the 'peacock dinner, ' immortalized in the famous photograph of the poets standing in a row, Lucy McDiarmid creates a new kind of literary history derived from intimacies rather than 'isms.' The dinner evolved from three close literary friendships, those between Pound and Yeats, Yeats and Lady Gregory, and Lady Gregory and Blunt, whose romantic affair thirty years earlier was unknown to the others. Through close readings of unpublished letters, diaries, memoirs, and poems, in an argument at all times theoretically informed, McDiarmid reveals the way marriage and adultery, as well as friendship, offer ways of transmitting the professional culture of poetry. Like the women who are absent from the photograph, the poets at its edges (F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington, Sturge Moore, and Victor Plarr) are also brought into the discussion, adding interest by their very marginality. This is literary history told with considerable style and brio, often comically aware of the extraordinary alliances and rivalries of the 'seven male poets' but attuned to significant issues in coterie formation, literary homosociality, and the development of modernist poetics from late-Victorian and Georgian beginnings. 00 |
Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 195-204) and index |
Notes |
Print version record |
Subject |
Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, 1840-1922.
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Plarr, Victor, 1863-1929.
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Moore, T. Sturge (Thomas Sturge), 1870-1944.
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Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939.
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Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972.
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Aldington, Richard, 1892-1962
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Flint, F. S. (Frank Stuart), 1885-1960.
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SUBJECT |
Aldington, Richard, 1892-1962 fast |
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Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, 1840-1922 fast |
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Flint, F. S. (Frank Stuart), 1885-1960 fast |
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Moore, T. Sturge (Thomas Sturge), 1870-1944 fast |
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Plarr, Victor, 1863-1929 fast |
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Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972 fast |
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Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939 fast |
Subject |
English poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism
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Poets, English -- 20th century -- Biography
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Dinners and dining -- England -- Sussex -- History -- 20th century
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POETRY -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
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Dinners and dining
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English poetry
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Poets, English
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England -- Sussex
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Genre/Form |
Biographies
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Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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History
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Biographies.
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Biographies.
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Form |
Electronic book
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ISBN |
9780191035357 |
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0191035351 |
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