Poetry Direct And Oblique
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
At the crossroads of feeling and form, E.M.W. Tillyard's Poetry Direct and Oblique presents one of the twentieth century's most illuminating frameworks for understanding how poetry communicates — arguing that verse operates along a spectrum, from the transparently direct, which states its meaning plainly, to the richly oblique, which achieves its power through indirection, imagery, and layered suggestion. Tillyard draws on a sweeping range of examples from English literature — from medieval balladry to the great Romantics — to illustrate how these two modes of poetic expression are not opposites but complementary forces that, in the finest poetry, work in dynamic tension with one another. A foundational text in mid-century literary criticism, the work reflects Tillyard's characteristic clarity of prose and his gift for making complex aesthetic questions accessible without sacrificing intellectual rigour. As a Cambridge scholar who also produced landmark studies of Milton and the Elizabethan world picture, Tillyard brings to this volume the same authoritative, historically grounded sensibility that defined his wider critical project. For anyone who has ever wondered why a particular line of verse resonates long after the page is turned, this study offers an answer that is at once scholarly and deeply personal.
Author: E.M.W. Tillyard
Format: Hardback
Genre: Literary theory
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
At the crossroads of feeling and form, E.M.W. Tillyard's Poetry Direct and Oblique presents one of the twentieth century's most illuminating frameworks for understanding how poetry communicates — arguing that verse operates along a spectrum, from the transparently direct, which states its meaning plainly, to the richly oblique, which achieves its power through indirection, imagery, and layered suggestion. Tillyard draws on a sweeping range of examples from English literature — from medieval balladry to the great Romantics — to illustrate how these two modes of poetic expression are not opposites but complementary forces that, in the finest poetry, work in dynamic tension with one another. A foundational text in mid-century literary criticism, the work reflects Tillyard's characteristic clarity of prose and his gift for making complex aesthetic questions accessible without sacrificing intellectual rigour. As a Cambridge scholar who also produced landmark studies of Milton and the Elizabethan world picture, Tillyard brings to this volume the same authoritative, historically grounded sensibility that defined his wider critical project. For anyone who has ever wondered why a particular line of verse resonates long after the page is turned, this study offers an answer that is at once scholarly and deeply personal.