Reviews for Poetry of the Forties

The average rating for Poetry of the Forties based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-01-21 00:00:00 Vincent Lapi Leavis, taking New Bearings in 1932, claims that Eliot is the real deal, man. This, with explication, is almost entirely the book: the three poets he has chapters on are Eliot himself, Pound as an Eliot-extension, and Hopkins as a guy who could have fixed things if we had listened to him in 1889 when he died, not 1918 when he was published (that is, as an alternate-universe Eliot). There is a whole lot of good in this book, both in terms of knowing the history of the field, and in individual appreciations, so I don't want to be reductive. But his argument is literally that Pound as an actual practicing poet is only important because of Mauberly, so, uh, reductiveness is kind of in the air.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-11-06 00:00:00 John Althaus If nothing else, read it for the old-school literary takedowns: "But so inferior a mind and spirit as [Robert] Browning's could not provide the impulse to bring back into poetry the adult intelligence" (p. 20). "[Thomas] Hardy is a naive poet of simple attitudes and outlook" (p. 57). Published in 1934, Leavis sets out to determine what is "modern" poetry. After clearing away the mediocre Victorian and Georgian poets in style, Leavis sets his sights on T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, finding in them the only possible seeds of change to move English poetry forward.