Elemental Things

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ELEMENTAL THINGS The Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid Harvey Oxenhorn This study of the growth of a poet's mind seeks to place MacDiarmid's work in relation to that of his more widely known 20th-century contemporaries. It concludes: 'MacDiarmid has a liberality of invention, a broader rangé of feeling than Eliot or Wallace Stevens, and his subject matter is intrinsically more interesting. He is often more tolerant, and less enamelled, than Pound; and unlike Stevens, makes a place for flesh-and-blood humán beings ... He writes hospitable poems . . . MacDiarmid, more than any of the others, seeks to ballast intellectual modernism with abiding humanism. Poetry assessed in such terms is certainly rare. It may be indispensable. It deserves, and rewards attention.' This conclusion, that puts the best of MacDiarmid's poetry among the creative achievements of this century, is not stated as dogma. It is worked for. Harvey Oxenhorn is a young American scholar who is himself a poet. He shows the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

ELEMENTAL THINGS The Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid Harvey Oxenhorn This study of the growth of a poet's mind seeks to place MacDiarmid's work in relation to that of his more widely known 20th-century contemporaries. It concludes: 'MacDiarmid has a liberality of invention, a broader rangé of feeling than Eliot or Wallace Stevens, and his subject matter is intrinsically more interesting. He is often more tolerant, and less enamelled, than Pound; and unlike Stevens, makes a place for flesh-and-blood humán beings ... He writes hospitable poems . . . MacDiarmid, more than any of the others, seeks to ballast intellectual modernism with abiding humanism. Poetry assessed in such terms is certainly rare. It may be indispensable. It deserves, and rewards attention.' This conclusion, that puts the best of MacDiarmid's poetry among the creative achievements of this century, is not stated as dogma. It is worked for. Harvey Oxenhorn is a young American scholar who is himself a poet. He shows the reader the beauty, intelligence, and passión of the early lyrics. In the first extended treatment of A drunk man..., he convinces us that its method and structure are more deliberately worked out than has generally been acknowledged, and that it offers a ground of humane feeling on which rationality can stand. He is good on the early socialist poetry, seeing the best work of the early 1930S as informed by a reductive stoicism which provides an organizing principle. His full-scale analysis of On a raised beach justifies his claim that it is the poet's íinest achievement - though matched, he explains, by the compelling power of Harry Semen. Thanks to the kindness of Valda Trevlyn and Michael Grieve, the University Press has been allowed to quote many poems in full, and this enhances the value of the book as an introduction, especially to lovers of poetry out with Scotland, to a creative writer of genius. Vissza