A Little History of Poetry

De: John Carey

Narrado por: Ralph Lister

The Bookseller (UK) Editor's Choice

A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work - over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not.

John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem “great” in the first place. This little history shines a light on the richness and variation of the world’s poems - and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.

©2020 John Carey (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing

Interesting details, great historical context, disappointingly Eurocentric

Despite providing a sky high overview of the history of poetry, this book does include many small, fascinating details about the lives of some of the greatest poets the world has ever known.

However the perspective is quite Eurocentric. I was very disappointed in the disproportionate amount of time spent on male English poets versus everyone else. Just two minutes dedicated to the great Maya Angelou.

I did enjoy the historical and political context provided in framing contributions to the world body of poetry.