Serious Poetry Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill [Hardcover]

Peter McDonald offers a controversial reading of twentieth-century British and Irish poetry centered on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill.Serious Poetryprovocatively returns these writers to the elements of difficulty and cultural disagreement where they belong.

1. Rather than Words: The End of Authority?
2. Yeats and Remorse
3. Yeats's Poetic Structures
4. Three Critics: Eliot, Heaney, Hill
5. One of Us: Eliot, Auden, and Four Quartets
6. Yeats, Form, and Northern Irish Poetry
7. MacNeice's Posterity
8. The Pitch of Dissent: Geoffrey Hill
Bibliography
Index

In Peter McDonald's important, intelligent and provocative book, a principled attention to form yields genuine insights which elude most critics.... McDonald's reading of Hill is, like all his readings, perspicacious and revealing. --Times Literary Supplement

An immensely valuable and rigorous book. --The Guardian

Peter McDonaldis Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in English, Christ Church, Oxford.