Bøger af Neil Corcoran

This book, by the eminent poetry critic Neil Corcoran, examines the ways in which the work of significant modern Irish, British and American poets interacts with or 'negotiates' different contexts - historical, social, political, artistic and aesthetic. In Part 1 important work by David Jones, Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney and Bob Dylan is shown to negotiate poetic methods - both traditional and modernist - and also the work of major earlier writers to produce strikingly original new forms; and Derek Mahon's prose is read in the light of these concerns. The books shows how, by negotiating in this way, their work engages profoundly with complex and sometimes terrible histories, including the First World War and the Northern Irish Troubles. Part 2 discusses the ways in which 'ekphrastic' work - poems which engage with visual art - by Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Graham, John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath and Ciaran Carson negotiates comparable poetic and historical inheritances while alsoinventively responding to work by significant artists, notably Parmigianino, Poussin, de Chirico, Klee and members of the St Ives School. The book is a signal contribution to current critical debates about these poets, situating them in original or newly clarified contexts, and it offers exemplary close readings of noteworthy poems.

'Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return' offers an imaginative new reading of the work of a writer still too little known. Neil Corcoran considers the theme of 'return' in her work in various senses, examining her treatment of Ireland, children and war.

Part of the "Longman Literature in English" series which aims to provide students of literature with a critical introduction to the major genres in their historical and cultural context. This text examines English poetry since 1940.

Explores different aspects of author's work, writing about his impact on their own intellectual and artistic lives, as well as his wider influence.

Shakespeare is a major influence on poets writing in English, but the dynamics of that influence in the twentieth century have never been as closely analysed as they are in this important study. More than an account of the ways in which Shakespeare is figured in both the poetry and the critical prose of modern poets, this book presents a provocative new view of poetic interrelationship. Focusing on W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Neil Corcoran uncovers the relationships - combative as well as sympathetic - between these poets themselves as they are intertwined in their engagements with Shakespeare. Corcoran offers many enlightening close readings, fully alert to contemporary theoretical debates. This original study of influence and reception beautifully displays the nature of poetic influence - both of Shakespeare on the twentieth century, and among modern poets as they respond to Shakespeare.

The new edition, which like the original has had the advantage of Seamus Heaney's own cooperation and unstinted access to the poet's papers, follows the same pattern, adding a chapter apiece on the major collections of poems published since 1986, as well as separate discussions of Heaney's work as a translator and essayist.