The Poetry Of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue In Modern Literary Tradition
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: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
At the intersection of Romantic sensibility and Victorian poetic craft stands one of the most influential works of twentieth-century literary criticism: Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of Experience. This landmark study argues that the dramatic monologue — as perfected by Browning, Tennyson, and their successors — is not merely a technical form but the defining mode of modern poetry, one that enacts the very tension between experience and judgment that characterises the post-Enlightenment mind. Langbaum presents a rigorous and elegant case for reading figures from Wordsworth to T.S. Eliot through the lens of this single, unifying impulse: the lyric speaker who dramatises consciousness itself. Drawing on a vast command of the Western literary tradition, Langbaum illustrates how the dramatic monologue became the vehicle through which modern poets negotiated the collapse of shared moral and religious certainties, replacing doctrine with felt experience as the ultimate arbiter of meaning. His prose is precise yet luminous, his critical method both historically grounded and theoretically bold — a rare combination in academic writing of any era. First published in 1957 and reissued by Penguin, the work retains a startling freshness that challenges readers to reconsider not only the poems they think they know, but the very nature of poetic utterance itself.
Author: Robert Langbaum
Format: Paperback
Genre: Literary theory
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
At the intersection of Romantic sensibility and Victorian poetic craft stands one of the most influential works of twentieth-century literary criticism: Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of Experience. This landmark study argues that the dramatic monologue — as perfected by Browning, Tennyson, and their successors — is not merely a technical form but the defining mode of modern poetry, one that enacts the very tension between experience and judgment that characterises the post-Enlightenment mind. Langbaum presents a rigorous and elegant case for reading figures from Wordsworth to T.S. Eliot through the lens of this single, unifying impulse: the lyric speaker who dramatises consciousness itself. Drawing on a vast command of the Western literary tradition, Langbaum illustrates how the dramatic monologue became the vehicle through which modern poets negotiated the collapse of shared moral and religious certainties, replacing doctrine with felt experience as the ultimate arbiter of meaning. His prose is precise yet luminous, his critical method both historically grounded and theoretically bold — a rare combination in academic writing of any era. First published in 1957 and reissued by Penguin, the work retains a startling freshness that challenges readers to reconsider not only the poems they think they know, but the very nature of poetic utterance itself.