Crawford, Robert

This groundbreaking study examines the way twentieth-century poets identify themselves with particular territories, constructing and reconstructing territorial identities. From America to Australia, and from Scotland and England to the Caribbean, it looks in detail at the poetry of six international poets, Robert Frost, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, Les Murray, John Ashbery and Frank Kuppner, as well as discussing the Scots work of Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead and Edwin Morgan, and the English-language work of Peter Reading, Judith Wright and Nobel Prize-winner Derek Walcott. Identifying Poets argues that the major theme of contemporary poetry is home and that poets who identify themselves with a 'home territory' are crucial and dominant in twentieth-century poetry. It is an original and perceptive study of modern international writing.

"This book looks at the rise and fall of 'Britishness' in literature over the last three centuries. Arguing that for much of its history the subject of 'English Literature' has been bound up with an assumed English cultural centre, Devolving English Literature examines the literary construction and questioning of a British (rather than simply English) literary identity. Surveying eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, including Robert Burns, James Boswell, Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle, Robert Crawford remaps literary history. He argues that Scottish and non-metropolitan authors left a crucial legacy to American literature, to the developing subject of anthropology, and to twentieth-century Modernism. In the work of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Hugh MacDiarmid and other Modernists there persist vitally 'provincial' as well as national elements. These continue to nourish the verse of sophisticated post-British 'barbarian' poets such as Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, Douglas Dunn, Les Murray and Derek Walcott. More than that, they are bound up with the contemporary literature and politics of Britain after devolution."--Jacket.

Listening, love, and a quickened awareness of vulnerability enrich the Scottish poet Robert Crawford's sixth collection of poems...Holding in balance the ecological and the technological, ancient and modern, Full Volume sings languages and cultures, people and habitats burgeoning on the brink of extinction. From revved-up battle-cry to nervous whisper, these lyrical poems praise intricate abundance. Assured in its rhymes and cadences, Full Volume is often attentive to poetry in other tongues, not least Gaelic. As their tones and forms shift from the spiritual to the wry, from haiku to brosnachadh, the poems' resonance and music build into a sustained sounding of what it means to live, love, and listen in a world where 'Nothing is ever single'.

"Addressed to all readers of poetry, this is a wide-ranging book about the poet's role throughout the last three centuries. It argues that a conception of the poet as both primitive and sophisticated emerged in the 1750s. Encouraged by the classroom when English literary works began to be studied in universities, this view continues to shape our own attitudes towards verse. Whether considering Ossian and the Romantics, Victorian scholar-gipsies, Modernist poetries of knowledge, or contemporary poetry in Britain, Ireland, and America, The Modern Poet shows how many successive generations of poets have needed to collaborate and to battle with academia."--BOOK JACKET.