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Poetic Form

Poetic Form

Poetic Form

An Introduction
Michael D. Hurley, St Catharine's College, Cambridge
Michael O'Neill, University of Durham
October 2012
Paperback
9780521774994

    Michael D. Hurley and Michael O'Neill offer a perceptive and illuminating look into poetic form, a topic that has come back into prominence in recent years. Building on this renewed interest in form, Hurley and O'Neill provide an accessible and comprehensive introduction that will be of help to undergraduates and more advanced readers of poetry alike. The book sees form as neither ornamenting nor mimicking content, but as shaping and animating it, encouraging readers to cultivate techniques to read poems as poems. Lively and wide-ranging, engaging with poems as aesthetic experiences, the book includes a long chapter on the elements of form that throws new light on troubling terms such as rhythm and metre, as well as a detailed introduction and accessible, stimulating chapters on lyric, the sonnet, elegy, soliloquy, dramatic monologue and ballad and narrative.

    • Offers a more inclusive and satisfying way of understanding poetic form and its implications
    • Provides a clear account and analysis of 'The Elements of Form' as well as explorations of lyric, the sonnet, epic, dramatic monologue, soliloquy, ballad and narrative
    • Contains many illuminating and informed close analyses, offering an understanding of how poetic form functions within literary history and in individual poems

    Reviews & endorsements

    'Michael Hurley and Michael O'Neill's Poetic Form: An Introduction offers an overview of the study of poetic form, including controversies. This clearly written and engaging text includes chapters on lyric; on the sonnet and elegy as subsets of lyric; on drama in the guise of the soliloquy and dramatic monologue, and finally on ballad and narrative.' Victorian Poetry

    See more reviews

    Product details

    October 2012
    Paperback
    9780521774994
    253 pages
    229 × 152 × 13 mm
    0.36kg
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction
    • 1. The elements of poetic form
    • 2. Lyric
    • 3. The sonnet
    • 4. Elegy
    • 5. Epic
    • 6. Soliloquy
    • 7. Dramatic monologue
    • 8. Ballad and narrative.
      Authors
    • Michael D. Hurley , St Catharine's College, Cambridge

      Michael D. Hurley combines a wide and interdisciplinary record of publishing in poetry and poetics with considerable experience as a teacher of close reading and practical criticism at Cambridge. His work is marked by an ambition to explore the relationship between what literature makes us feel and how it makes us think. His recent book on G. K. Chesterton was praised by one critic for being 'striking in the precision of its formal analysis and the elegance of its prose'.

    • Michael O'Neill , University of Durham

      Michael O'Neill is a well-known critic of poetry whose writings include monographs on Shelley (1989), Romanticism and the self-conscious poem (1997) and the twentieth- and twenty-first century literary legacies of Romantic poetry (2007). He edited the Cambridge History of English Poetry (2010) and a much-praised anthology of Romantic poetry with detailed comments on poetic form (2008). He has published two collections of poems and received a Cholmondeley Award for Poets in 1990. His work has been celebrated by many critics for its sensitivity to poetry and its ability to find an answerable language for poetic effects.