• ISBN13: 9780748656172
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: English Literature
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publisher Imprint: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication Date: January 1, 2012
• Pages: 207
• Original Price: GBP 85.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 472 grams
• BISAC Subject(s): European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

The first study of poetic language from a historical and philosophical perspective
In a series of 12 chapters, exemplary poems - by Walter Ralegh, John Milton, William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Frank O'Hara, Robert Creeley, W. S. Graham, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley and Thomas A. Clark - are read alongside theoretical discussions of poetic language.
The discussions provide a jargon-free account of a wide range of historical and contemporary schools of thought about poetic language, and an organised, coherent critique of those schools (including analytical philosophy, cognitive poetics, structuralism and post-structuralism). Via close readings of poems from 1600 to the present readers are taken through a wide range of styles including modernist, experimental and innovative poetries. Paired chapters within a chronological structure allow lecturers and students to approach the material in a variety of ways (by individual chapters, paired historical periods) that are appropriate to different courses.
Key Features:
Surveys a variety of linguistic and philosophical approaches to poetic language: analytical, cognitive, post-structuralist, pragmatic
Provides readings of complete poems and places those readings within the wider context of each poet's work
Combines theory and practice
Includes a Glossary, Notes on Poets and Suggested Further Reading