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Title: The Portable Romantic Poets (The Viking Portable Library) by W. H. Auden, Norman Holmes Pearson ISBN: 0-14-015052-8 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: June, 1977 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A good selection, co-edited by a poet
Comment: One of the annoying things about the received opinion about the Romantic poets is the statement that there were exactly six of them--Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley. This pronouncement is usually delivered with equal conviction to assertions you usually hear only in the natural sciences--e.g., that there are three kinds of human muscle (cardiac, striated, and slow-flexing) and two kinds of stony drip-accreted icicles in caves (stalactites and stalagmites). Nor elsewhere in the area of literature do you quite hear that there were so many Russian realist novelists, so many French Symbolist poets, so many English medieval poets, etc. So it's something of a relief to read in the editors' introduction to the "Portable Romantic Poets" that American romantics are included as well, because poets don't just arrest their reading, as anthologizers usually arrest their selecting, at continental or national boundaries. It's also welcome to see the inclusion of poets who are sometimes left out because they might be felt to be minor or unpopular (Landor) or generically different (Burns) by anthologizers. This anthology is a welcome corrective to received wisdom about who actually qualifies as a Romantic. And the efficient introduction is a minor masterpiece of cultural exposition as well.
Rating: 4
Summary: Man can imagine states of existence other than they are.
Comment: The first verse of William Blake's Auguries of Innocence appears in Bronowski, as homage to Ludwig Boltzmann: " To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour...." William Blake was born in London in 1757. He attended drawing school and thereafter eked out a very modest existence as an engraver and artist. He was not able to find a publisher so in 1789 he himself engraved and published Songs of Innocence and The Book of Thel. Blake died in 1827. Blake was one of many 'romantic poets' of that epoch. Auden and Pearson point out that the romantic definition of man appears towards the end of the eighteenth century. The divine element that man possesses is not power nor free will of reason, but self-consciousness. Man can see possibilities, he can imagine states of existence other than they are.
Rating: 5
Summary: nice collection, provides context with poems
Comment: Far be it from me to critique these poets, but I can say something about this particular presentation. It's a handy little volume, with a several-page introduction providing historical context, and a several-page calendar of British and American poetry from 1750 to around 1850. The calendar doesn't just list poetry, it includes events like "Watt's steam engine patented" and "Lewis and Clark Expedition" as well as the publication of novels and music, so context is well established. At the back of the book is an index of poems by title and by first line, and there's a set of biographical notes on the poets.
If you want to know what romantic poetry's all about, take a look at this. I don't know how an English Lit Ph.D. would rate this book but I think it's a nice collection.
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Title: English Romantic Poetry : An Anthology by Stanley Appelbaum ISBN: 0486292827 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 08 November, 1996 List Price(USD): $2.50 |
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Title: Literature of the Western World, Volume I: The Ancient World Through the Renaissance (5th Edition) by Brian Wilkie, James Hurt ISBN: 013018666X Publisher: Prentice Hall Pub. Date: 28 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $64.00 |
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Title: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Mythos Books) by Joseph Campbell ISBN: 0691017840 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 March, 1972 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Portable Greek Reader (The Viking Portable Library) by W. H. Auden ISBN: 0140150390 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: August, 1977 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: The Adventures of Ibn Battuta : A Muslim Traveller of the 14th Century by Ross E. Dunn ISBN: 0520067436 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: April, 1990 List Price(USD): $17.59 |
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