Presenting Poetry

The presentation of poetry to auditor and reader involves a complex interaction of rhetorical, orthographical and visual mediating skills. At issue are the nature of 'authority', the creation of a readership attuned to the writer's poetic resonances, and a delicate negotiation between literary tradition and individual talent. In a series of detailed readings leading scholars focus on the presentation of work by Spenser, Herbert, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Smart, Blake, Wordsworth, Browning, Newman, Yeats, Lawrence and David Jones. The wide chronological range enables unusually extensive comparison across the boundaries of generic form, and between the varying emotional, aesthetic and rhetorical emphases of specific periods: from the creation of fictitious personae to the construction of autobiographical 'self', from the interaction of printed word and visual image to the arrangements and rearrangements of structure and sequence.

Introduction; Part I: 'Personae', Sequence and Commentary: 1. 'Little booke: thy selfe present': the politics of presentation in The Shepheardes Calendar Richard A. McCabe; 2. 'Cut without hands': Herbert's Christian altar Alastair Fowler; 3. On historical commentary: the example of Milton and Dryden Howard Erskine-Hill; 4. Sequences of reading: Pope's Moral Essays and Intimations of Horace Pat Rogers; Part II. The Self Presented and Revised: 5. Presenting jeopardy: language, authority, and the voice of Smart in Jubilate Agno Tom Keymer; 6. Did Blake betray the French Revolution? A dialogue of the mind with itself Jerome K. McGann; 7. Presentation of the self in the composition of The Prelude Robert Woof; 8. The epiphanic mode in Browning's poetry Robert Langbaum; Part III. Readerships Inherited and Invented: 9. Newman's leading Eric Griffiths; 10. The politics of genre and audience in Yeats Seamus Deane; 11. The shaping of D. H. Lawrence's Look We Have Come Through! Mark Kinkead-Weekes; 12. Presentation and self-presentation in In Parenthesis Colin Wilcockson.