Hollow Palaces: An Anthology of Modern Country House Poems [Paperback]

This unique gathering of poems about country houses from Hardy to Armitage is more than just a highly entertaining anthology of accessible modern verse. It amounts to a survey of politico-historical shifts in twentieth-century British society as seen and imagined by both insiders and outsiders. It is the first such anthology.As a genre of poetry, the country house poem was born in the seventeenth century. As English country house society itself grew in prominence, the poem of commemoration diminished in popularity; not until the Edwardian era, when the country house as an institution began to wane, was there a renewed interest in country house poetry. As the power and influence of landed society dwindled, the country house began to haunt the English literary imagination, and our poets found in its dereliction a frequent subject and theme. This is the first book to gather modern and contemporary country house poems into one collection. Poets representing a diversity of class, race, gender, and generation offer a wide variety of perspectives: stately exteriors and interiors, crumbling ruins, gardens both wild and cultivated, and the voices of noble owners, servants, and curious visitors. The dominant note sounded is perhaps unsurprisingly elegiac, yet comic, satiric, and gothic tones appear frequently as well. The common thread is that, in response to the rapid sociological changes of the twentieth century, poets reflect on the country house as an architecturally, politically, socially, and economically potent symbol and institution, both in its heyday and in its eclipse. It's a fabulous assemblage of work that does make you think about these buildings in new ways. What appeal does this anthology have to those of us in boxes of concrete and glass, starter Barratt homes or suburban mock Tudor villas? As it turns out, a lot. Mostly this is driven by the way the book is organised, grouped into what at first glance are surprising themes. [...] Close your eyes and you justl3˜