The Advantage of Lyric Essays on Feeling in Poetry [Hardcover]

In the title essay, Professor Hardy argues for the special advantage of lyric over other other literary genres in conveying intense private feelings publicly. She then gives detailed consideraton to the lyric poetry of John Donne, Arthur Hugh Clough, and a group of poets central to the modernist canon: Hopkins, Yeats, Aden, Dylan Thomas, and Sylvia Plath. Those interested in W.H. Auden will find the book of particular value, since Auden occupies a central place in it. W.H. Auden has frequently been held up as the modern example par excellence of a 'public poet' whose works betray relatively little in the way of personal emotion. In the cahpters entitled 'The Reticence of W.H. Auden, Thirties to Sixties: A Face and a Map' barbara Hardy shows the inadequacy of that characterization and opens the way for a fresh appreciation of Auden's achievement as a poet. Readers interested in modern poetry genearlly and all readers acquainted with Barara Hardy's previous books will the book of importance.

1 The Advantage of Lyric
2 Thinking and Feeling in the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne
3 Clough's Self-Consciousness
4 Forms and Feelings in the Sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins
5 Passion and Contemplation in Yeats's Love Poetry
6 The Reticence of W.H. Auden
7 W.H. Auden, Thirties to Sixties: a Face and a Map
8 The Personal and the Impersonal in some of Dylan Thomas's Lyrics
9 The Poetry of Sylvia Plath
Index

Barbara Hardy is a poet, autobiographer and novelist, as well as a critic whose books include three on George Eliot and three on Dickens. She is Emeritus Professor at Birkbeck, University of London, Honorary Professor of the University of Wales, Swansea, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the British Academy.