Lucy McDiarmid - Böcker

This collection offers a revisionist picture of modernism. This group of prominent scholars including Havey Teres, David Bromwich, A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and Lucy McDiarmid consider the major modernist writers who are customarily treated as if they wrote in different eras and different worlds: the "epicene" high modernists (Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, et al) and the more "popular" low modernists (Hardy, Shaw, Wells, et al), and bring these writers into critical proximity with one another.

On January 18, 1914, seven male poets gathered to eat a peacock. W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, the celebrities of the group, led four lesser-known poets to the Sussex manor house of the man they were honouring, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: the poet, horse-breeder, Arabist, and anti-imperialist married to Byron's only granddaughter. In this story of the curious occasion that came to be known as the 'peacock dinner,' immortalized in the famous photograph of the poets standing in a row, Lucy McDiarmid creates a new kind of literary history derived from intimacies rather than 'isms.' The dinner evolved from three close literary friendships, those between Pound and Yeats, Yeats and Lady Gregory, and Lady Gregory and Blunt, whose romantic affair thirty years earlier was unknown to the others. Through close readings of unpublished letters, diaries, memoirs, and poems, in an argument at all times theoretically informed, McDiarmid reveals the way marriage and adultery, as well as friendship, offer ways of transmitting the professional culture of poetry. Like the women who are absent from the photograph, the poets at its edges (F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington, Sturge Moore, and Victor Plarr) are also brought into the discussion, adding interest by their very marginality. This is literary history told with considerable style and brio, often comically aware of the extraordinary alliances and rivalries of the 'seven male poets' but attuned to significant issues in coterie formation, literary homosociality, and the development of modernist poetics from late-Victorian and Georgian beginnings. Poets and the Peacock Dinner is written with critical sophistication and a wit and lightness that never compromise on the rich texture of event and personality.

On January 18, 1914, seven male poets gathered to eat a peacock. W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, the celebrities of the group, led four lesser-known poets to the Sussex manor house of the man they were honouring, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: the poet, horse-breeder, Arabist, and anti-imperialist married to Byron's only granddaughter. In this story of the curious occasion that came to be known as the 'peacock dinner,' immortalized in the famous photograph of the poets standing in a row, Lucy McDiarmid creates a new kind of literary history derived from intimacies rather than 'isms.' The dinner evolved from three close literary friendships, those between Pound and Yeats, Yeats and Lady Gregory, and Lady Gregory and Blunt, whose romantic affair thirty years earlier was unknown to the others. Through close readings of unpublished letters, diaries, memoirs, and poems, in an argument at all times theoretically informed, McDiarmid reveals the way marriage and adultery, as well as friendship, offer ways of transmitting the professional culture of poetry. Like the women who are absent from the photograph, the poets at its edges (F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington, Sturge Moore, and Victor Plarr) are also brought into the discussion, adding interest by their very marginality. This is literary history told with considerable style and brio, often comically aware of the extraordinary alliances and rivalries of the 'seven male poets' but attuned to significant issues in coterie formation, literary homosociality, and the development of modernist poetics from late-Victorian and Georgian beginnings. ^lPoets and the Peacock Dinner is written with critical sophistication and a wit and lightness that never compromise on the rich texture of event and personality.

'Saving civilization' was the grandiloquent cry of the 1920s and 1930s, This is a study of the various answers these three great modern British poets - Yeats, Eliot and Auden - gave to the question of how a 'mere writer' could affect the world of his audience. The author concentrates on the years between the wars, a time when the pressure to save civilization was felt by poets and political leaders alike. The book avoids the typical political labels associated with these poets, such as 'reactionary' or 'leftist'. Rather, it analyses the conflict the three felt between a civic urge to become engagé and an artistic need to remain disengaged. Dr McDiarmid traces the story of the different ideals the poets formulated in response to the fragmentation and anxiety of the modern world. Yeats, Eliot and Auden experienced a simultaneous disillusionment over political goals and a triumphant rededication to artistic ones. Their realistic adjustments to the limiting conditions of the twentieth century are sensitively described in a work that has immediate interest and permanent value.

Common wisdom has it that when Auden left England for New York in January 1939, he had already written his best poems. He left behind (most critics believe) all the idealisms of the 1930s and all serious concerns to become an unserious poet, a writer of ingenious, agreeable, minor lyrics. Lucy McDiarmid argues that such readers, spoiled by the simple intensities of apocalypse, distort and misjudge Auden's greatest work. She shows that once Auden was freed from the obligation to criticize and reform the society of his native country, he devoted his imaginative energies to commentary on art. And about art he was never complaisant: with greater passion than he had ever used to undermine "bourgeois" society, Auden undermined literature. Every major poem and every essay became a retractio, a statement of art's frivolity, vanity, and guilt. Auden's Apologies for Poetry, then, sets forth the unorthodox notion that the chief subject of later, "New Yorker" Auden is the insignificance of poetry.Commenting on all the major poems and essays from the 1930s through the 1960s, and analyzing manuscript revisions and unpublished works, it charts the changes in Auden's poetics in the light of his shift from an oral to a written model of poetry. In his earliest work Auden voices the tentative hope that poems can be like loving spoken words, transforming and redeeming, themselves carriers of value. After 1939 he takes for granted a written model. His later essays and poems deny art spiritual value, claiming that "love, or truth in any serious sense" is a "reticence," the unarticulated worth that exists--if at all--outside the words on the page. Later Auden creates a poetics of apology and self-deprecation, a radical undermining of poetry itself. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions.The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Common wisdom has it that when Auden left England for New York in January 1939, he had already written his best poems. He left behind (most critics believe) all the idealisms of the 1930s and all serious concerns to become an unserious poet, a writer of ingenious, agreeable, minor lyrics. Lucy McDiarmid argues that such readers, spoiled by the simple intensities of apocalypse, distort and misjudge Auden's greatest work. She shows that once Auden was freed from the obligation to criticize and reform the society of his native country, he devoted his imaginative energies to commentary on art. And about art he was never complaisant: with greater passion than he had ever used to undermine "bourgeois" society, Auden undermined literature. Every major poem and every essay became a retractio, a statement of art's frivolity, vanity, and guilt. Auden's Apologies for Poetry, then, sets forth the unorthodox notion that the chief subject of later, "New Yorker" Auden is the insignificance of poetry.Commenting on all the major poems and essays from the 1930s through the 1960s, and analyzing manuscript revisions and unpublished works, it charts the changes in Auden's poetics in the light of his shift from an oral to a written model of poetry. In his earliest work Auden voices the tentative hope that poems can be like loving spoken words, transforming and redeeming, themselves carriers of value. After 1939 he takes for granted a written model. His later essays and poems deny art spiritual value, claiming that "love, or truth in any serious sense" is a "reticence," the unarticulated worth that exists--if at all--outside the words on the page. Later Auden creates a poetics of apology and self-deprecation, a radical undermining of poetry itself. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions.The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Controversies are high drama: in them people speak lines as colorful and passionate as any recited on stage. In the years before the 1916 Rising, public battles were fought in Ireland over French paintings, a maverick priest, Dublin slum children, and theatrical censorship. Controversy was "popular," wrote George Moore, especially "when accompanied with the breaking of chairs."In her new book, Lucy McDiarmid offers a witty and illuminating account of these and other controversies, antagonistic exchanges with no single or no obvious high ground. They merit attention, in her view, not because the Irish are more combative than other peoples, but because controversies functioned centrally in the debate over Irish national identity. They offered to everyone direct or vicarious involvement in public life: the question they articulated was not "Irish Ireland or English Ireland" but "whose Irish Ireland" would dominate when independence was finally achieved.The Irish Art of Controversy recovers the histories of "the man who died for the language," Father O'Hickey, who defied the bishops in his fight for Irish Gaelic; Lady Gregory and Bernard Shaw's defense of the Abbey Theatre against Dublin Castle; and the 1913 "Save the Dublin Kiddies" campaign, in which priests attacked socialists over custody of Catholic children. The notorious Roger Casement—British consul, Irish rebel, humanitarian, poet—forms the subject of the last chapter, which offers the definitive commentary on the long-lasting controversy over his diaries.McDiarmid's use of archival sources, especially little-known private letters, indicates the way intimate exchanges, as well as cartoons, ballads, and editorials, may exist within a public narrative. In its original treatment of the rich material Yeats called "intemperate speech," The Irish Art of Controversy suggests new ways of thinking about modern Ireland and about controversy's bluff, bravado, and improvisational flair.

Slightly Magical Irish Poetry and the Long 1990s is a major intervention in the field of Irish literary studies, disrupting conventional divisions and interpretive categories, mixing established poets and new ones, and including poems in English and Irish. McDiarmid argues convincingly for the importance of the ontologically ambiguous or 'slightly magical' mode in recent Irish poetry. She brings her wealth of knowledge in the field of Irish literary and cultural criticism to bear on subjects as whimsical as cats, railroad reveries and hair, and as serious as political critiques of both Irelands during the upheavals of the 1990s. Drawing on the author's conversations with the poets themselves, the book is written in a style that is witty and learned, sophisticated but always accessible.