DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

The Poet and his Audience

Ian Jack author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:5th Jul '84

Currently unavailable, our supplier has not provided us a restock date

This hardback is available in another edition too:

The Poet and his Audience cover

A systematic exploration of the influence of readers on the shaping of six major poets' works.

In this fascinating and illuminating book Ian Jack has chosen six major poets - Dryden, Pope, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, and Yeats - and has traced the career of each to discover the nature and the extent of their readers' influence on their poetry.How far, and in what respects, is a poet's work influenced by the kind of audience for which he writes? The question is crucial to our understanding of how great poems came to be written, yet it has rarely been addressed in a systematic study. In this fascinating and illuminating book Ian Jack has chosen six major poets - Dryden, Pope, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, and Yeats - and has traced the career of each to discover the nature and the extent of their readers' influence on their poetry. He shows that poets living in different periods and different cultural milieux addressed themselves to very differently constituted audiences (though all tended to have a close circle of highly sensitive friends on whom they could first test their work in private), and indicates how their need to adapt to the prevailing conditions shaped the nature of their poetry.

ISBN: 9780521260343

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 370g

208 pages