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ISBN: HB: 9780300232226

Yale University Press

March 2020

288 pp.

21.6x14 cm

40 black&white illus.

HB:
£14,99
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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.

About the Author

John Carey is emeritus professor at Oxford. His books include "The Essential 'Paradise Lost'", "What Good Are the Arts?", studies of Donne and Dickens, and a biography of William Golding. "The Unexpected Professor", his memoir, was a Sunday Times best-seller.