Reviews for On English poetry

The average rating for On English poetry based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-06-13 00:00:00 Anthony Rivera This reproduction is a good reading copy. There are no bad pages and the scan is good enough to preserve someone's marginal comments.. In his biography of Graves, Martin Seymour Smith wrote 'On English poetry, for all its immaturity is in many ways even now a salutary and lucid book….it contains Graves' view of poetry in embryo and is invaluable as a young poet's immediate record of his practice-and as a record of the principles which guided him. It is the first book of its time to take a truly psychological approach to poetry, and to make use of modern psychological method.' It's a book by a young man, except this young man had been declared dead and had fought through the first world war. Seymour-Smith thought Graves turned to theory to dig himself out of a hole. The subtitle is honest: you have been warned. Irregular and subjective, the book consists of numbered sections which don't link, and Graves' evidence is mostly his own practice. For anyone interested in Graves as poet or in poetry criticism in general, it's a worthwhile read. Graves on poetry is always productive, even when, as he often was later, he was stubbornly and gloriously wrong headed. Like everything else he wrote he grounded what he said on on what he did. And from the start he wrote it all down in a clear, precise prose that laid his cards on the table. It's a fascinating book to compare with Eliot's 'The Sacred Wood' which is roughly contemporary. While Eliot was hiding himself in theories of impersonality and turning his subjective state into declarations of Law, often in prose that seemed to require professional training to 'understand', Graves was trying to 'save' himself by accepting the mess he was in and writing out of it or through it, in some very personal writing. While Eliot was sprinkling his verse with fragments from other languages, Graves, who was possibly a much better classicist than either Pound or Eliot, and whose knowledge of poetry and depth of reading was as good as either of theirs, was resolutely sticking to poetry in English. It feels odd now to read a book that refuses to play the familiar scholarly games. Graves proceeds in numbered fragments, allusions, guess work. It will not, did not, could not satisfy those who thought criticism should be scientific, or who can't read someone they don't agree with, but I think I'd rather read him on Englsih poetry than anyone else.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-11-03 00:00:00 Simon Spence This is a surprisingly useful book on writing and appreciating poetry, as well as on the life and calling of a poet. I say surprising, because the table of contents seems off-putting, listing 61 chapters, plus introductory note and appendix. But it turns out that some of the chapters of this short book are extended aphorisms, and throughout, Graves maintains a balance between authority and chattiness. He is opinionated, but his pronouncements are grounded in an awareness of the difficulty of the poet's task and his admiration for the best of their achievements. Along the way, the reader also learns some of what Graves doesn't like. He wants no history of poetry, since it would mean treating the less good as extensively as the great. By his standards, the less good would be most of the 17th century (except Milton), spilling over to Pope and the other didactic poets of the early 18th. Such a history would also overemphasize either form or ideas. Both play a role in a great poem, but they don't make a poem great. He is suspicious of schools, although he does concede a back and forth between two tendencies that he, in common with many others, terms Classic and Romantic. Although his sympathies are more with the latter, he is exacting in matters of form and rhythm. His admiration of Blake doesn't extend to the hermetic world of his prophetic books, and he feels Whitman would have been better if he had disciplined his writing more. For Graves, a poem is the product of both magic and craftsmanship. The magic is the first moment of inspiration, and doesn't occur to just anyone. A born poet incorporates conflicting personalities and loyalties within himself (I'll leave aside attempts at gender-neutral language, Graves isn't PC in his views on woman poets). To be great, a poem must bear in itself an emotional conflict. But it's not a great poem until going through the craftsmanship phase, when the poet worries and fiddles with vowel sounds, assonance, rhythm, rhyme, and word choices. Among the pearls is his sensible comment on diction: "Ideally speaking, there is no especially poetic range of subjects, and no especially poetic group of words with which to treat them. Indeed, the more traditionally poetical the subject and the words, the more difficult it is to do anything with them." He's also refreshingly honest on what he calls putty: the material to which even the greatest of poets resorts to fill in the cracks in his poem. He hopes no one else notices, but is himself mortifyingly aware that it's there. I enjoyed spending the day with Graves as he shared this with me; at times, I forgot that the day was spent in airplanes and airport lounges; it felt more like we were in a corner booth of his favorite pub with a pint of ale.