Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award
Power, Plain English, and the Rise of Modern Poetry
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Description
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 English” for truthfulness is employed by Modern poets to conceal the rift between their (probably irreconcilable) ambitions for themselves.
ISBN
9780300100716
Publication Date
2006
Disciplines
American Literature | Arts and Humanities | Critical and Cultural Studies | Nonfiction | Poetry
Recommended Citation
Rosen, David, "Power, Plain English, and the Rise of Modern Poetry" (2006). Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award. 7.
https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/rpw_bkaw/7
Comments
2006 Winner