Power, Plain English, and the Rise of Modern Poetry
David Rosen
Abstract
This book offers a radically new account of Modern poetry and revises our understanding of its relation to Romanticism. British poets from Wordsworth to Auden attempted to present themselves simultaneously as persons of power and as moral voices in their communities. The modern lyric derives its characteristic complexities—psychological, ethical, formal—from the extraordinary difficulty of this effort. The low register of our language—a register of short, concrete, native words arranged in simple syntax—is deeply implicated in this story. The author shows how the peculiar reputation of “plain ... More
Keywords: Modern poetry, Romanticism, Wordsworth, Auden, plain English, truthfulness, ambitions, moral voices, language
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2006 | Print ISBN-13: 9780300100716 |
| Published to Yale Scholarship Online: October 2013 | DOI:10.12987/yale/9780300100716.001.0001 |
