| Description |
vii, 219 pages ; 23 cm |
| Series |
Early modern literature in history |
|
Early modern literature in history.
|
| Contents |
1. Occasional Poetics in the Early Modern Lyric -- 2. 'Pardon, Blest Soul, the Slow Pac'd Elegies': Ambition and Occasion in Justa Edovardo King -- 3. Carrion Crows: Occasion in the Beginning and End of Dryden's Literary Life -- 4. Nadir: the Generation of Namur and the Famine of Occasions -- 5. 'To Darkness and to Me': Mental Event as Poetic Occasion -- 6. Gray to Cowper: Cat to Cast-away via 'Night Thoughts' -- 7. Conclusion: the Deployment of the New-Modelled Lyric by Wordsworth -- App. Johnson's Summary of Contemporary Accounts of Dryden's Funeral |
| Summary |
"Why do so many modern English poems begin with a lonely wanderer experiencing a private emotion? This book offers a striking new thesis: that the modern lyric poem evolved as an adaptation to the demand for 'truth in poetry' by post-Reformation English readers. The demand for truth led to a preference for poems grounded in verifiable public occasions (deaths, battles, weddings). As English poets competed for the right to commemorate important occasions, they developed new ways of commemorating conventional occasions and, in a long process culminating in the revolutionary poems of the 1740s, extended the notion of poetic occasion to include occasions such as the death of unknown strangers (as in Gray's Elegy) and even unverifiable mental occasions such as the epiphanies which so regularly strike Wordworth's solitary wanderers."--BOOK JACKET |
| Notes |
Published in association with the Renaissance Texts Research Centre at the University of Reading |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Subject |
English poetry -- History and criticism.
|
|
Literature and history -- Great Britain -- History.
|
|
Occasional verse, English -- History and criticism.
|
| Author |
University of Reading. Renaissance Texts Research Centre.
|
| LC no. |
98054305 |
| ISBN |
0312220944 (St Martin's Press) |
|
0333733584 |
|
