Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Old English poetry
- 2 The Gawain-poet and medieval romance
- 3 Late fourteenth-century poetry (Chaucer, Gower, Langland and their legacy)
- 4 Langland: Piers Plowman
- 5 Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales
- 6 Late medieval literature in Scotland: Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas
- 7 Sixteenth-century poetry: Skelton, Wyatt and Surrey
- 8 Spenser
- 9 Sidney, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan sonnet and lyric
- 10 The narrative poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare
- 11 Seventeenth-century poetry 1: poetry in the age of Donne and Jonson
- 12 Seventeenth-century poetry 2: Herbert, Vaughan, Philips, Cowley, Crashaw, Marvell
- 13 Milton’s shorter poems
- 14 Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes
- 15 Restoration poetry: Behn, Dryden and their contemporaries
- 16 Dryden: major poems
- 17 Swift
- 18 Poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century: Pope, Johnson and the couplet
- 19 Eighteenth-century women poets
- 20 Longer eighteenth-century poems (Akenside, Thomson, Young, Cowper and others)
- 21 Lyric poetry: 1740–1790
- 22 Romantic poetry: an overview
- 23 Blake’s poetry and prophecies
- 24 Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads and other poems
- 25 Wordsworth’s The Prelude and The Excursion
- 26 Second-generation Romantic poetry 1: Hunt, Byron, Moore
- 27 Byron’s Don Juan
- 28 Second-generation Romantic poetry 2: Shelley and Keats
- 29 Third-generation Romantic poetry: Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hemans, Landon
- 30 Women poets of the Romantic period (Barbauld to Landon)
- 31 Victorian poetry: an overview
- 32 Tennyson
- 33 Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
- 34 Emily Brontë, Arnold, Clough
- 35 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne
- 36 Christina Rossetti and Hopkins
- 37 Later Victorian voices 1: James Thomson, Symons, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Housman
- 38 Later Victorian voices 2: Davidson, Kipling, ‘Michael Field’ (Bradley and Cooper), Lee-Hamilton, Kendall, Webster
- 39 Modernist and modern poetry: an overview
- 40 Hardy and Mew
- 41 Yeats
- 42 Imagism
- 43 T. S. Eliot
- 44 Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon and Edward Thomas
- 45 Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender: the thirties poetry
- 46 Dylan Thomas and poetry of the 1940s
- 47 Larkin and the Movement
- 48 Three twentieth-century women poets: Riding, Smith, Plath
- 49 Hughes and Heaney
- 50 Hill
- 51 Mahon, Longley, Muldoon, McGuckian, Carson, Boland and other Irish poets
- 52 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 1: the radical tradition
- 53 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 2
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
1 - Old English poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2011
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Old English poetry
- 2 The Gawain-poet and medieval romance
- 3 Late fourteenth-century poetry (Chaucer, Gower, Langland and their legacy)
- 4 Langland: Piers Plowman
- 5 Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales
- 6 Late medieval literature in Scotland: Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas
- 7 Sixteenth-century poetry: Skelton, Wyatt and Surrey
- 8 Spenser
- 9 Sidney, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan sonnet and lyric
- 10 The narrative poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare
- 11 Seventeenth-century poetry 1: poetry in the age of Donne and Jonson
- 12 Seventeenth-century poetry 2: Herbert, Vaughan, Philips, Cowley, Crashaw, Marvell
- 13 Milton’s shorter poems
- 14 Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes
- 15 Restoration poetry: Behn, Dryden and their contemporaries
- 16 Dryden: major poems
- 17 Swift
- 18 Poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century: Pope, Johnson and the couplet
- 19 Eighteenth-century women poets
- 20 Longer eighteenth-century poems (Akenside, Thomson, Young, Cowper and others)
- 21 Lyric poetry: 1740–1790
- 22 Romantic poetry: an overview
- 23 Blake’s poetry and prophecies
- 24 Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads and other poems
- 25 Wordsworth’s The Prelude and The Excursion
- 26 Second-generation Romantic poetry 1: Hunt, Byron, Moore
- 27 Byron’s Don Juan
- 28 Second-generation Romantic poetry 2: Shelley and Keats
- 29 Third-generation Romantic poetry: Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hemans, Landon
- 30 Women poets of the Romantic period (Barbauld to Landon)
- 31 Victorian poetry: an overview
- 32 Tennyson
- 33 Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
- 34 Emily Brontë, Arnold, Clough
- 35 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne
- 36 Christina Rossetti and Hopkins
- 37 Later Victorian voices 1: James Thomson, Symons, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Housman
- 38 Later Victorian voices 2: Davidson, Kipling, ‘Michael Field’ (Bradley and Cooper), Lee-Hamilton, Kendall, Webster
- 39 Modernist and modern poetry: an overview
- 40 Hardy and Mew
- 41 Yeats
- 42 Imagism
- 43 T. S. Eliot
- 44 Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon and Edward Thomas
- 45 Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender: the thirties poetry
- 46 Dylan Thomas and poetry of the 1940s
- 47 Larkin and the Movement
- 48 Three twentieth-century women poets: Riding, Smith, Plath
- 49 Hughes and Heaney
- 50 Hill
- 51 Mahon, Longley, Muldoon, McGuckian, Carson, Boland and other Irish poets
- 52 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 1: the radical tradition
- 53 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 2
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
Old English poetry is a somewhat improbable recent success story, in an era when formal study of classical literature and even the study of modern languages have been in decline in England. The most prominent success was Seamus Heaney’s verse translation of Beowulf in 1999, a volume which won prizes in competition not only with other poetry books but with books in all literary categories. Important as the positive reception of Heaney’s marvellous translation was, it was not a sole cause of the new popularity of Old English poetry. His book was also a confirmation of the popularity of this poetry with English poets dating back to the Victorian period and strengthening amongst Modernist poets in the earlier twentieth century. Heaney’s predecessors here include Longfellow, Hopkins, Auden, Pound and Edwin Morgan. Some Old English poems, such as The Wanderer, The Seafarer and Wulf and Eadwacer are amongst the most widely translated items in the twentieth century. There have been a number of attempts to identify what quality it was that commended these poems so much to the modern taste, in particular to that of the Modernists; a recurrent phrase is ‘the power of the half-stated’. Auden’s enthusiasm is much quoted: ‘I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish … Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry have been one of my strongest, most lasting influences.’ In the main part of this essay I want to concentrate on what Auden might mean by ‘influences’, trying to describe what qualities in Old English poetry were found useful and expressive for writers in English of later periods.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of English Poetry , pp. 7 - 25Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
References
ed. The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, (London: Oxford University Press, 1935).
and (eds.), Essential Articles for the Study of Old English Poetry (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1968).
, ‘The Lost Literature of Medieval England’, originally published in The Library, Fourth Series, 5:4 (March 1925).Google Scholar
, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. (New York: Pantheon Books; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953; originally published in German in 1948).Google Scholar
and (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).CrossRef
and , A New Critical History of Old English Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
, ‘The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature’, New Literary History, 10:2 (Winter 1979).Google Scholar
, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and (eds.), The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–53).
(ed.), The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994; second edition 2000).
, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).Google Scholar
, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
(ed.), Middle English Verse Romances, Exeter Medieval English Texts and Studies (1966; Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1986).
, ‘Humfrey Wanley’, in Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953),.Google Scholar
ed. The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
, ‘The Monsters and the Critics’, and Other Essays, ed. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983). Essay written 1936.Google Scholar
- 2
- Cited by