Lives of the Modern Poets: With a New Preface by the Author

Re-evaluates the individual successes of nine modern poets including Hardy, Yeats, Frost, Pound, and Eliot by presenting biographies, character studies, and critical appraisals of their works

Lives of the Modern Poets

Pritchard, William H.

History

Oxford University Press

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

An incisive analysis of the complex interaction between the poet's life and work offers a chronological approach to Frost's life and poetry

Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

In this engaging study, William H. Pritchard sees Frost whole, demonstrating that Frost's life was indeed a literary one and that the essential fact about it was the poetry that came from it. Lawrance Thompson's controversial three-volume biography of Frost, published during the 1960s, lead many readers to believe that Frost was selfish, jealous, petty, and ruthlessly manipulative of others. While it doesn't attempt to revive the image of Frost as a benign, white-haired sage, this book presents him in a strikingly different light. In Pritchard's view, both Frost's life and his work offer an example of a powerful imagination and of human energies extravagant and compelling.

Surveys work produced by English writers between the two world wars, stressing their shared disillusion and assessing the value of each writer to today's readers

Seeing Through Everything: English Writers, 1918-1940

This elegantly written study concentrates on the complex interaction between Jarrell's life and work, describing and commenting on his most important poems and prose, but also focusing on the significant events and experiences of his life. Pritchard dramatizes the ambiguous character of the man: a worshipper of childhood, deeply at odds with his own early years; a wonderfully commonsensical and humorous critic whose imagination was haunted by darker patterns of story and myth.

Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

234p hardback with dustjacket transparent film, index, a fresh and clean copy from a Cambridge library

Seeing through everything: English writers, 1918-1940

FABER

History & Criticism

Faber&Faber

On Poets and Poetry

William Pritchard’s collection of essays and reviews on poets and poetry ranges from Dryden and Milton through the major American and British poets of the last century. One of them, Philip Larkin, answered an interviewer’s question about what he had learned from his study of other poets by snapping back, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t study poets! You read them, and think: That’s marvelous; how is it done?” Although Pritchard has been talking with students about poets for more than fifty years, his practice in writing has Larkin’s question in mind: how to describe convincingly the way it’s done, the “marvelous” creations of Tennyson, Hardy, Yeats, Robert Lowell, or Larkin himself. Pritchard’s aim throughout is to address not only academics but the larger, intelligent audience of non-specialist readers who look to poetry for the surprise that is central to all imaginative literature. Hugh Kenner, one of three twentieth-century critics of poetry treated in this book, once wrote that “the chief requisite for criticism is not analytic skill but a trained sensibility.” William Pritchard’s sensibility has been trained in the practice of attending to a poet’s style and voice―of what Robert Frost once called “ear-reading.” His endeavor is not to discover hidden, buried treasures (what the poem “really means”) but to engage with instances of measured language as they reveal themelves, in both the “timing” of individual poems and the historical time in which poets and poetry live.

SWALLOW PRESS+

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Books by Pritchard, William H.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pritchard, William H.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Lives of the Modern Poets

Lives of the Modern Poets

Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered

Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered

Seeing Through Everything: English Writers, 1918-1940

Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life

Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life

Seeing through everything: English writers, 1918-1940

Lives of the Modern Poets

On Poets and Poetry