Serious Poetry

Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about?The history of poetry in twentieth-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a media culture; it is also, however, another history, one of form and authority, in which certain poets found modes and pitches of resistance to the seeming inevitabilities of their times. In this history, it is the authority of poetry(and not the media-processed poet) which is at stake in the integrity of poetic form.Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill offers a controversial reading oftwentieth-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Yeats's centrality to twentieth-century poetry - and the problem many poets and critics had, or still have, with that centrality - is a major focus of the book. Serious Poetry argues that it is in the strengths, possibilities, perplexities, and certainties of the poetic form that poetry'sauthority in a distrustful cultural climate remains most seriously alive.

“The strength of the book lies in its close readings of syntax, structure and semantic nuance.”

Review from other book by this author lucid, careful and diplomatic study of poetry and Northern Ireland ... there is much to applaud in McDonald's explication of the theme of 'identity' and the assertions which pepper his own narrative should find critical consent. ... Mercifully Peter McDonald is concerned with the real thing and has the scholarly and intellectual commitment to engage with poetry and its ideological vortex without disappearing throughthe looking-glass of theory in extremis. Mistaken Identities rightly lives protectively among the poems of those the critic admires while keeping a close eye on the politics of those he finds loitering withintent. This is an important book to read.'Fortnight, no.364, September 1997Review from other book by this author McDonald's criticism is informed by an active engagement with Northern Ireland and with poetry.'The Times Higher Education Supplement`Review from other book by this author interesting, wide-ranging and tetchy study ... Certainly this book, though it fans an important debate about the politics of 'identity', finds its major strengths in the little decentred details of style and cultural nuance which its author, an always astute and at his best a super-sensitive reader of poetry, succeeds in teasing out.'Stan Smith, Irish Studies Review, Vol 7 No 3 1999

Peter McDonald is Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in English, Christ Church, Oxford.

Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about?The history of poetry in twentieth-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a media culture; it is also, however, another history, one of form and authority, in which certain poets found modes and pitches of resistance to the seeming inevitabilities of their times. In this history, it is the authority of poetry (and not the media-processed poet) which is at stake in the integrity of poetic form.Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill offers a controversial reading of twentieth-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Yeats's centrality to twentieth-century poetry - and the problem many poets and critics had, or still have, with that centrality - is a major focus of the book. Serious Poetry argues that it is in the strengths, possibilities, perplexities, and certainties of the poetic form that poetry's authority in a distrustful cultural climate remains most seriously alive.

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