Publishers Weekly
02/17/2020
In this clever, wide-ranging history, British literary critic Carey (The Essential Paradise Lost) provides a tour of Western poetry, from Homer to Maya Angelou. Each brief chapter tackles one or more poets representative of a particular era, with excerpts from their works, brief accounts of their lives, and Carey’s insightful critical commentaries. His writing is instructive yet wry, as in his description of Petrarch’s love poetry as “numbingly tedious” and consisting of “a lot of weeping, but little else.” The reader is given a sense of how poets can be compared and contrasted with one another (Keats and Shelley, for example, as fellow exemplars of Romanticism who were, respectively, profoundly sensual and consumed with abstract ideals). Carey’s is a very traditional look at the Western canon, meaning the poets represented are overwhelmingly white, and perhaps even more overwhelmingly British, though a fair share of women are covered. Also, the book ends on poems written in the 1960s and ’70s, so there is no contemporary ground covered. In any case, it is called a “little history,” so one cannot expect it to be all things to all people. Those looking for a shrewdly condensed and accessible history of poetry could not ask for a better guide. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
[The] book reviewer and Oxford don has great fun, galloping through 4,000 years of verse. Reputations are flayed and poetic gems are uncovered.”—Robbie Millen and Andrew Holgate, The Times and Sunday Times, “Best Books of 2020” “[A] fizzing, exhilarating book”—Sebastian Faulks, Sunday Times“Carey’s delightful survey never takes itself or its subject too seriously. ‘Over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten,’ he writes. ‘This is a book about some that have not.’”—New York Times Book Review“Don’t let the diminutive title fool you. This is an expansive, not to mention accessible, tour of poetry’s importance and evolution, from ‘Beowulf’ to Shakespeare to Maya Angelou and beyond.”—Washington Post 2020 Holiday Gift Guide“Few modern literature professors are capable of writing a book as interesting and mischievous as this.”—James Marriott, The Times ‘Best Literary Non-Fiction Books of 2020’“This supremely compact and erudite introduction doesn’t just pack in a bunch of facts and potted biographies, it somehow manages to convey the transcendent glory of the form through the ages, whether it’s sagas, hymns, ballads or verse...Carey is frighteningly well informed but always accessible, and this guide will offer riches whether you’re a total newbie or a poetry buff.”—Sybille Bedford, The Sunday Times 'Best Literary Books of 2020' “As an introduction to poetry, and a reminder of its power to find beauty and consolation in almost every human experience, this anthology is a delight.”—Jane Shilling, Daily Mail ‘Must Reads'“In this clever, wide-ranging history, British literary critic Carey provides a tour of Western poetry, from Homer to Maya Angelou. Each brief chapter tackles one or more poets representative of a particular era, with excerpts from their works, brief accounts of their lives, and Carey’s insightful critical commentaries. . . . Those looking for a shrewdly condensed and accessible history of poetry could not ask for a better guide.”—Publishers Weekly“A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray. . . . Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.”—Kirkus Reviews“An Oxford don, John Carey has a remarkably unpretentious and encyclopedic knowledge of names, places, poems, poets, and poetic moments and movements, which he evinces while offering a subtle critique of modernist obscurity.”—James P. Lenfestey, Rain Taxi“Warm in tone, informative, generous in its sympathies, inviting in its choices, with a clear emphasis on human stories underpinning poetic achievement.”—Emma Smith, author of This is Shakespeare“This wonderfully positive and vivid history is a delight on every page ... Carey’s sparkling Little History of Poetry is an astonishingly full introduction to English poetry from Beowulf to the present, set in a framework extending in place and time from Gilgamesh to Akhmatova and Seferis.”—Bernard O'Donoghue, Winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award“Here is an informative, fast-moving book … Like Carey’s previous works, it’s forceful as well as clear, and it’s populist, no-nonsense and anti-elite in its sympathies. Many people may find new favourites here.”—Stephanie Burt, Professor of English, Harvard University“Books about poetry are rarely page turners, but Carey’s little history is gripping, is unputdownable! Reading this book and its galaxy of poets is like looking up at the sky and seeing the whole wheeling and constellated universe.”—Daljit Nagra, author of Look We Have Coming to Dover!“An elegant history of poetry, what it is, what it does, why it matters, written in an authoritative and engaging voice. Masterly.”—Ruth Padel, author of 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem
JULY 2020 - AudioFile
After taking us from Mesopotamia to Rome, this audiobook focuses primarily on English-language poetry. Brief excursions take place into other languages, but the only one whose poetry is considered in any real depth is English. Its exploration of that is pretty thorough, though, and Ralph Lister's narration is exemplary. He clearly differentiates between the historical and critical material, and he inhabits the poems in ways that focus on the points John Carey makes about them. And those points are not only about why the poems and poets were interesting in their times but also about why they are worth reading today. The audiobook makes that case quite well. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2020-02-09
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
