Peter McDonald is a poet and critic. Born in Belfast, he has taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Bristol, and Oxford, where he has since 1999 been Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church College. He is the author of five volumes of poetry, and his Collected Poems will appear from Carcanet in September 2012. His literary criticism includes two influential works on modern poetry, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (OUP, 1997) and Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (OUP, 2002), and he has edited Louis MacNeice's Collected Poems (Faber, 2007). He is a regular contributor to the TLS and other literary periodicals. He is currently editing a three-volume edition of W.B. Yeats's Complete Poems for Longman.

Sound Intentions exemplifies the kind of attentive and insistently enquiring reading that any more than merely descriptive literary study demands

• Introduction ; 1. Rhyme, Chance, and Repetition ; 2. William Wordsworth: Poetry and Repose ; 3. John Keats: 'The Very Word' ; 4. Alfred Tennyson: Memory and Hope ; 5. Christina Rossetti: The Sound of the Sea ; 6. Gerard M. Hopkins: 'Driven to it' ; Afterword: Rhyme and Three Poets ; Appendix: William Wordsworth, 'Ode'

Peter McDonald is a poet and critic. Born in Belfast, he has taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Bristol, and Oxford, where he has since 1999 been Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church College. He is the author of five volumes of poetry, and his Collected Poems will appear from Carcanet in September 2012. His literary criticism includes two influential works on modern poetry, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (OUP, 1997) and Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (OUP, 2002), and he has edited Louis MacNeice's Collected Poems (Faber, 2007). He is a regular contributor to the TLS and other literary periodicals. He is currently editing a three-volume edition of W.B. Yeats's Complete Poems for Longman.

Sound Intentions exemplifies the kind of attentive and insistently enquiring reading that any more than merely descriptive literary study demands

• Introduction ; 1. Rhyme, Chance, and Repetition ; 2. William Wordsworth: Poetry and Repose ; 3. John Keats: 'The Very Word' ; 4. Alfred Tennyson: Memory and Hope ; 5. Christina Rossetti: The Sound of the Sea ; 6. Gerard M. Hopkins: 'Driven to it' ; Afterword: Rhyme and Three Poets ; Appendix: William Wordsworth, 'Ode'

Peter McDonald is a poet and critic. Born in Belfast, he has taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Bristol, and Oxford, where he has since 1999 been Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church College. He is the author of five volumes of poetry, and his Collected Poems will appear from Carcanet in September 2012. His literary criticism includes two influential works on modern poetry, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (OUP, 1997) and Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (OUP, 2002), and he has edited Louis MacNeice's Collected Poems (Faber, 2007). He is a regular contributor to the TLS and other literary periodicals. He is currently editing a three-volume edition of W.B. Yeats's Complete Poems for Longman.

Sound Intentions exemplifies the kind of attentive and insistently enquiring reading that any more than merely descriptive literary study demands

• Introduction ; 1. Rhyme, Chance, and Repetition ; 2. William Wordsworth: Poetry and Repose ; 3. John Keats: 'The Very Word' ; 4. Alfred Tennyson: Memory and Hope ; 5. Christina Rossetti: The Sound of the Sea ; 6. Gerard M. Hopkins: 'Driven to it' ; Afterword: Rhyme and Three Poets ; Appendix: William Wordsworth, 'Ode'