A Reader's Guide to Fifty Modern British Poets

SCHMIDT, Michael

Barnes&Noble

Dresden, Gate

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

RANDOM HOUSE UK

European poetry takes its bearings from a brilliant constellation of classical Greek and Latin poets and Biblical writers whose lives (where they are known as legend or fact) and work (as it survives) continue to inform our writing and reading, even as the original languages, once central to a humane education, fall into disuse. The poets’ stories, their loves, lusts and longings, the forms they devise, their rhetorical strategies, are vital in urgent ways, so that Ted Hughes finds new life through Ovid, Christopher Logue through Homer, Les Murray through Hesiod, Ezra Pound through Propertius, Seamus Heaney through Dante, and a host of writers through Horace, Catallus, Sappho and others. In this book Michael Schmidt writes about the twenty classical poets who have had most influence. The obvious ones – Homer, David, Dante, Virgil – gain from the presence of important lesser-known writers including for instance the lyricist Anacreon, Theocritus the father of pastoral, and Boethius who haunted the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Where the lives are verifiable they are fascinating – and the miracle that these people became writers and that their work survives. Where true lives are shrouded in mystery, later writers and readers provide narratives of their own. We know more about Homer than Homer could ever know about himself. The classics have been alive for more than a millennium in our literature. The object of this book is to entertain, inform and create an awareness of necessary presences: these are poets out of whom our imaginations, like our literatures, are woven.

The First Poets

History & Criticism

Weidenfeld&Nicolson

In this wonderfully entertaining and instructive book Michael Schmidt gives us a history of English poetry from 1500 to 1700. The book divides into two halves - the first is a history of the poets' lives, the times during which they were writing, and an account of their works; and the second is an anthology of the poetry itself. Schmidt shows how language and the poetic imagination are shaped by politics and history, and never more so than during the period of the Renaissance to the Restoration . This is an invaluable book for all readers of poetry and students who will find no other competing volume available. This is the second book in a major four-volume project which will provide the most comprehensive history of English poetry.

The Story of Poetry : English Poets from Skelton to Dryden

An introduction to fifty modern British poets (Pan literature guides)

Pan Books

Lives of the Poets

A dazzling account of the entire history of poetry in the English language -- from the fourteenth century to the present -- by one of the most intelligent and passionate critics in the field. Setting out to write his own homage to Samuel Johnson's legendary Lives of the English Poets of more than two hundred years ago, Michael Schmidt introduces us to the world tradition of poets who have written in English. From the rustic rhythms of Piers Plowman to today's postmodernists, from fifteenth-century Scotland to the contemporary Caribbean, Schmidt explores the lives and creations of more than three hundred poets, discussing their best (and sometimes worst) poems, their triumphs and tragedies, their individual genius. Here is the shared universe and work of so many great poets, including Chaucer, Donne, Blake, Behn, Burns, Wordsworth, Whitman, Dickinson, Rossetti, Yeats, Stevens, Lowell, Bishop, Ginsberg, Rich and Heaney, to name but a few. Schmidt also embraces the extraordinary poetry now emerging from Australia, New Zealand, India and other countries, and shows how these varied landscapes and cultures make their contributions to our common language. Tracing the themes and achievements of each poet's work, Schmidt demonstrates with wit and erudition how poets overshadow and inspire one another across the centuries. En route, he champions some unjustly neglected voices and outlines the ways in which history and politics intervene to shape (or sometimes misshape) the poetic imagination. With infectious enthusiasm and avoiding all fashionable jargon, Schmidt speaks unapologetically for a common language -- the language of poetry, which unites people across continents and across the ages. For anyone who has ever been moved by a poem, a rich and important book.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

KNOPF

When Michael Schmidt’s last book, Lives of the Poets, was published, Mark Strand called it “a tour de force, an astonishing view of the whole of poetry in English, a superb read.” Now Schmidt brings the same erudition, insight, and élan to The First Poets—the story of the ancient Greeks whose work continues to influence poetry in our own time. Poetry takes its bearings from the brilliant constellation of early and classical Greek poets, who have long been overshadowed by the great Greek dramatists. In The First Poets, Schmidt rescues the lives of these poets from their relative obscurity. Here is Orpheus, the first of the first poets, healer, mystic, and magical fixer; and Homer, about whom almost nothing is known for certain except the magnificence of his two great epic poems. Here are Linos and Arion, who survive only in legend; and Amphion, who survives through the tales we ascribe to him. Here are Sappho, the greatest Greek woman writer, and Hesiod; Hipponax, the “dirty old man of poetry”; and Theocritus, the father of the pastoral; and many others. Combining the verifiable facts of their lives and the narratives provided by later writers, Schmidt walks the fine line between fact and scholarly conjecture to create vivid, animated, wonderfully compelling portraits of these ancestors of our culture.

The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets

A dazzling literary exploration by acclaimed poet and critic Michael Schmidt, The First Poets brings to life for the general reader the great Greek poets who gave our poetic tradition its first bearings and whose works have had an enduring influence on our literature and our imagination. Starting with the legendary and possibly mythical Orpheus and with Homer, Schmidt conjures a host of our literary forebears. From Hipponax, “the dirty old man of poetry,” to Theocritus, the father of pastoral; from Sappho, who threw herself from a cliff for love, to Hesiod, who claimed a visit from the Muses–the stories in The First Poets masterfully merge fact and conjecture into animated and compelling portraits of these ancestors of our culture.

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

[The book] provides accessible but substantial introductions to [its] subjects, which are especially appropriate to the basic needs of the student, the teacher, and the interests of the general reader.

A Reader's Guide to Fifty British Poets 1300-1900

British & Irish

Rl Innactive Titles

Reading Modern Poetry

How do we read modern poetry? Michael Schmidt--editor, critic, teacher, and poet--argues that reading poetry is a skill and a passion, developed and perfected through sensitive reading of the poetry of the past. How can we hear clearly the poems of Ted Hughes if we have not heard Shakespeare and the Jacobeans, or Thom Gunn if we have not heard Ben Jonson? Schmidt insists on hearing, the unarguable aesthetic test. He examines the techniques of language that different poets develop in relation to their mentors and to the colloquial usage of their own class and time. Schmidt discriminates between judgement and taste, inviting readers to look beyond the subjective and the familiar and to take up the challenge of 'difficult' poetry which opens the ear to unexpected sounds and sources. He is harsh about the currently fashionable terms 'voice', 'narrative', and 'self-expression', suggesting that the terminology of popular and specialized criticism is in need of an overhaul. Central to his argument is a distinction between convention and tradition in writing. Philip Larkin and William Carlos Williams, he contends, share a tradition, and skilled readers will perceive the marginality of their imitators. The tyranny of 'schools', 'movements', and--significantly--'nations' here gives way to a sense of particular writers working in a shared medium, and of particular readers who develop their imaginative and intuitive abilities alongside a sharpened critical and historical sense. The book makes the case for poems at a time when criticism--journalistic and theoretical--pushes poems behind a hedge of personality or jargon.

Routledge& Kegan Paul

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Books by SCHMIDT, Michael

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

A Reader's Guide to Fifty Modern British Poets

Dresden, Gate

The First Poets

The Story of Poetry : English Poets from Skelton to Dryden

An introduction to fifty modern British poets (Pan literature guides)

Lives of the Poets

The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets

The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets

A Reader's Guide to Fifty British Poets 1300-1900

Reading Modern Poetry