Don Cameron Allen – лучшие книги

The 7 essays in this volume are concerned with the central question: How have major poets of the past used and altered poetic tradition? The poets that are the subject of these essays are Pindar, Euripides, Horace, Vergil, Spencer, Herbert, and Whitman. Each essay was delivered during the academic year of 1965-6 at the John Hopkins University as the Percy Graeme Turnball Memorial Lectures on Poetry.

When they were first issued, the essays that form the substance of this book constituted experiments in reading learned poems. The author has now added four new essays on Shakespeare, Milton, and Herrick which continue to develop the method - now proved by time - that was announced in the original volume. Professor Allen contends that no one can explain precisely how Renaissance poetry - or the poetry of any age beyond our own - was written or how it was read by contemporaries. Although approximations may be made, even the most learned, the most sensitive and perceptive of these will only partially recapture the meaning of the work in its cultural and emotional milieu. At best, modern man can read a poem only as a modern man. The reader who makes associations between literary themes and poetic figures, however, can most often achieve an understanding of the spirit of the poetry of the past. Professor Allen employs in these essays the technique of looking into each metaphor and tracing its meaning in the context of all Western literature, beginning with the earliest Greek poetry. According to the previous use of metaphors and themes by Greek, Latin, and medieval poets, as well as by Continental contemporaries, he explicates eleven well-known poems and one play of the English Renaissance. His analysis reveals rich variations in the use and meaning of theme and image and enables him to develop fresh interpretations of the poems.

this paperback edition originated as lectures delivered at The Johns Hopkins Poetry Festivals held in 1958 and 1961. Marianne Moore, Mark Van Doren, Yvor Winters, and R.P.Blackmur discuss their art in general and the works of three other poets in particular: Edwin Muir, Edith Sitwell, and Thomas Hardy. Johns Holmes, May Sarton, Richard Eberhart, Richard Wilbur, and Randall Jarrell are concerned to identify the nature of poetry, the roles of the poet and critic, and the function that poetry serves in life and society.