Sean Pryor – författare

What is a poem? What ideas about the poem as such shape how readers and audiences encounter individual poems? To explore these questions, the first section of this Companion addresses key conceptual issues, from singularity and genre to the poem's historical exchanges with the song and the novel. The second section turns to issues of form, focusing on voice, rhythm, image, sound, diction, and style. The third section considers the poem's social and cultural lives. It examines the poem in the archive and in the digital sphere, as well as in relation to decolonization and global capitalism. The chapters in this volume range across both canonical and non-canonical poems, poems from the past and the present, and poems by a diverse set of poets. This book will be a key resource for students and scholars studying the poem.

What is a poem? What ideas about the poem as such shape how readers and audiences encounter individual poems? To explore these questions, the first section of this Companion addresses key conceptual issues, from singularity and genre to the poem's historical exchanges with the song and the novel. The second section turns to issues of form, focusing on voice, rhythm, image, sound, diction, and style. The third section considers the poem's social and cultural lives. It examines the poem in the archive and in the digital sphere, as well as in relation to decolonization and global capitalism. The chapters in this volume range across both canonical and non-canonical poems, poems from the past and the present, and poems by a diverse set of poets. This book will be a key resource for students and scholars studying the poem.

Diverse modernist poems, far from advertising a capacity to prefigure utopia or save society, understand themselves to be complicit in the unhappiness and injustice of an imperfect or fallen world. Combining analysis of technical devices and aesthetic values with broader accounts of contemporary critical debates, social contexts, and political history, this book offers a formalist argument about how these poems understand themselves and their situation, and a historicist argument about the meanings of their forms. The poetry of the canonical modernists T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, and Wallace Stevens is placed alongside the poetry of Ford Madox Ford, better known for his novels and his criticism, and the poetry of Joseph Macleod, whose work has been largely forgotten. Focusing on the years from 1914 to 1930, the book offers a new account of a crucial moment in the history of British and American modernism.

Emphasizing the interplay of aesthetic forms and religious modes, Sean Pryor's ambitious study takes up the endlessly reiterated longing for paradise that features throughout the works of W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. Yeats and Pound define poetry in terms of paradise and paradise in terms of poetry, Pryor suggests, and these complex interconnections fundamentally shape the development of their art. Even as he maps the shared influences and intellectual interests of Yeats and Pound, and highlights those moments when their poetic theories converge, Pryor's discussion of their poems' profound formal and conceptual differences uncovers the distinctive ways each writer imagines the divine, the good, the beautiful, or the satisfaction of desire. Throughout his study, Pryor argues that Yeats and Pound reconceive the quest for paradise as a quest for a new kind of poetry, a journey that Pryor traces by analysing unpublished manuscript drafts and newly published drafts that have received little attention. For Yeats and Pound, the journey towards a paradisal poetic becomes a never-ending quest, at once self-defeating and self-fulfilling - a formulation that has implications not only for the work of these two poets but for the study of modernist literature.

Diverse modernist poems, far from advertising a capacity to prefigure utopia or save society, understand themselves to be complicit in the unhappiness and injustice of an imperfect or fallen world. Combining analysis of technical devices and aesthetic values with broader accounts of contemporary critical debates, social contexts, and political history, this book offers a formalist argument about how these poems understand themselves and their situation, and a historicist argument about the meanings of their forms. The poetry of the canonical modernists T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, and Wallace Stevens is placed alongside the poetry of Ford Madox Ford, better known for his novels and his criticism, and the poetry of Joseph Macleod, whose work has been largely forgotten. Focusing on the years from 1914 to 1930, the book offers a new account of a crucial moment in the history of British and American modernism.

Emphasizing the interplay of aesthetic forms and religious modes, Sean Pryor's ambitious study takes up the endlessly reiterated longing for paradise that features throughout the works of W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. Yeats and Pound define poetry in terms of paradise and paradise in terms of poetry, Pryor suggests, and these complex interconnections fundamentally shape the development of their art. Even as he maps the shared influences and intellectual interests of Yeats and Pound, and highlights those moments when their poetic theories converge, Pryor's discussion of their poems' profound formal and conceptual differences uncovers the distinctive ways each writer imagines the divine, the good, the beautiful, or the satisfaction of desire. Throughout his study, Pryor argues that Yeats and Pound reconceive the quest for paradise as a quest for a new kind of poetry, a journey that Pryor traces by analysing unpublished manuscript drafts and newly published drafts that have received little attention. For Yeats and Pound, the journey towards a paradisal poetic becomes a never-ending quest, at once self-defeating and self-fulfilling - a formulation that has implications not only for the work of these two poets but for the study of modernist literature.