The New Poetic

This book offers a classic survey of modern English poetry from the new tradition established by Yeats in the 1890s through to Eliot, including a reassessment of the Georgians and the influence of Pound. Reading T. S. Eliot and reading about T. S. Eliot were equally formative experiences for my generation. One of the books about him which greatly appealed to me when I first read it...was "The New Poetic" by the New Zealand poet and critic, C. K. Stead.

ISBN 0826494730   Volumes 1 ISBN13 9780826494733 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 194 Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd.   Published in London Imprint Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd.   Series title Classic Criticism S. Format Paperback   Previous ISBN 9780485121377 Publication date 29 Mar 2007   Height (mm) 129 DEWEY 821.91209   Width (mm) 198 DEWEY edition DC22   Spine width (mm) 10 Pages 192   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly

Foreword to the Revised Edition; 1. Introduction; 2. W. B. Yeats, 1895-1916 An illustration of the problems; 3. 1909-1916: Poets and their Public Sonority... like a goose; 4. 1909-1916: 'Poetry' versus 'Life' Imperialists; Georgians; War poets. 5. The Social Function of Poetry Pound and the Imagists; Eliot; 6. Eliot's 'Dark Embyro' The merger of morals and aesthetics; 7. The Poetry of T. S. Eliot Affirmation and the Image; 8. Conclusion; Index; Acknowledgements.

"'A short but brilliant history. Essential to anyone interested in the development of modern poetry.' The Guardian 'The Waste Land in Stead's reading is the vindication of a poetry of image, texture and suggestiveness; of inspiration; of poetry which writes itself. It represents a defeat of the will, an emergence of the ungainsayable and symbolically radiant out of the subconscious deeps. Rational structure has been overtaken or gone through like the sound barrier. The poem does not disdain intellect, yet poetry, having to do with feelings and emotions, must not submit to the intellect's eagerness to foreclose. It must wait for a music to occur, an image to discover itself. Stead thus rehabilitated Eliot as a Romantic poet, every bit as faithful to the process of dream and susceptible to gifts of the unconscious as Coleridge was before he received the person from Porlock. And so the figure of Old Possum, netted for years in skeins of finely-drawn commentary upon his sources, his ideas, his criticism of the modern world and so on, this figure was helped to rise again like Gulliver in Lilliput, no longer a hazy contour of philosophy and literary allusion, but a living principle, a far more natural force than had been recognized until then.' - Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (1986)"

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