The Cambridge History of English Poetry

Poetry written in English is uniquely powerful and suggestive in its capacity to surprise, unsettle, shock, console, and move. The Cambridge History of English Poetry offers sparklingly fresh and dynamic readings of an extraordinary range of poets and poems from Beowulf to Alice Oswald. An international team of experts explores how poets in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland use language and to what effect, examining questions of form, tone, and voice; they comment, too, on how formal choices are inflected by the poet's time and place. The Cambridge History of English Poetry is the most comprehensive and authoritative history of the field from early medieval times to the present. It traces patterns of continuity, transformation, transition, and development. Covering a remarkable array of poets and poems, and featuring an extensive bibliography, the scope and depth of this major work of reference make it required reading for anyone interested in poetry.

Introduction Michael O'Neill; 1. Old English poetry Bernard O'Donoghue; 2. The Gawain-poet and medieval romance Corinne Saunders; 3. Late fourteenth-century poetry (Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and their legacy) Wendy Scase; 4. Langland: Piers Plowman A. V. C. Schmidt; 5. Chaucer - Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales Laura Varnam; 6. Late-medieval literature in Scotland: Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas Felicity Riddy; 7. Sixteenth-century poetry: Skelton, Wyatt and Surrey Elizabeth Heale; 8. Spenser Andrew Hadfield; 9. Sidney, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan sonnet and lyric Katharine A. Craik; 10. The narrative poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare Paul Edmondson; 11. Seventeenth-century poetry 1: poetry in the age of Donne and Jonson Jonathan Post; 12. Seventeenth-century poetry 2: Herbert, Vaughan, Philips, Cowley, Crashaw, Marvell Alison Shell; 13. Milton's shorter poems Barbara K. Lewalski; 14. Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes Barbara K. Lewalski; 15. Aphra Behn, John Dryden and their contemporaries Hester Jones; 16. Dryden: major poems Steven N. Zwicker; 17. Swift Claude Rawson; 18. Poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century: Pope, Johnson and the couplet Claude Rawson; 19. Eighteenth-century women poets Christine Gerrard; 20. Longer eighteenth-century poems (Akenside, Goldsmith, Thomson, Young, Cowper, and others) Richard Terry; 21. Lyric poetry: 1740–90 David Fairer; 22. Romantic poetry: an overview Seamus Perry; 23. William Blake's poetry and prophecies John Beer; 24. Wordsworth and Coleridge - Lyrical Ballads and other poems Timothy Webb; 25. Wordsworth's The Prelude and The Excursion Alison Hickey; 26. Second-generation Romantic poetry 1 (Hunt, Byron, Moore) Jane Stabler; 27. Byron's Don Juan Bernard Beatty; 28. Second-generation Romantic poetry 2 (Shelley and Keats) Michael O'Neill; 29. Third-generation Romantic poetry: Beddoes, Darley, Clare, Hemans, Landon Michael Bradshaw; 30. Women poets of the Romantic period (Barbauld to Landon) Heidi Thomson; 31. Victorian poetry: an overview Richard Cronin; 32. Tennyson Robert Douglas-Fairhurst; 33. Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning Herbert Tucker; 34. Emily Brontë, Arnold, and Clough Michael O'Neill; 35. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne David G. Riede; 36. Christina Rossetti and Hopkins Catherine Phillips; 37. Later Victorian voices 1 (James Thomson, Symons, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Housman) Nicholas Shrimpton; 38. Later Victorian voices 2: John Davidson, Rudyard Kipling, 'Michael Field' (Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Cooper), Eugene Lee-Hamilton, May Kendall, Augusta Webster Francis O'Gorman; 39. Modernist and modern poetry: an overview Jason Harding; 40. Hardy and Mew Ralph Pite; 41. Yeats Peter Vassallo; 42. Imagism Vincent Sherry; 43. T. S. Eliot Gareth Reeves; 44. Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon, and Edward Thomas Mark Rawlinson; 45. Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender: the thirties poetry Michael O'Neill; 46. Dylan Thomas and poetry of the 1940s John Goodby; 47. Larkin and the Movement Stephen Regan; 48. Three twentieth-century women poets: Laura Riding, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath Alice Entwistle; 49. Hughes and Heaney Edward Larrissy; 50. Hill Andrew Michael Roberts; 51. Mahon, Muldoon, McGuckian, Carson, Boland and other Irish poets Stephen Regan; 52. Contemporary poetries in English: c.1980 to the present 1 - the radical tradition Peter Barry; 53. Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 2 Jamie McKendrick; Bibliography; Index.

Michael O'Neill is Professor of English at Durham University.