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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Reflective Journey Toward Order: Essays on Dante, Wordsworth, Eliot, and Others

The Reflective Journey Toward Order: Essays on Dante, Wordsworth, Eliot, and Others

Montgomery, Marion

Paperback

Literary CriticismPoetry CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 082033197X
ISBN13: 9780820331973
Publisher: Univ Of Georgia Pr
Published: Oct 1 2008
Pages: 332
Weight: 1.07
Height: 0.74 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

This book embodies a sequence of closely related essays which explore the modern poet's uneasy awareness of a tradition-the romantic tradition-with which he must contend. The author's premise is that the romantic age extends from The Divine Comedy through Wordsworth to Eliot. The roots of contemporary questions about the self and alienation are seen to extend at least as far back as Dante, who is the first poet to choose the ego as a focus for poetry of epic dimensions.

In the course of the study Montgomery considers the growing emphasis upon the self's becoming the focus of poetry until this shift culminated in the literature of the most autobiographical century in western letters--the twentieth. Dante, Wordsworth, and Eliot are discussed at length, individually and in relation to one another, as principal instances of the reflective poet. The critic also considers other illustrative figures such as Milton, Coleridge, Keats, Whitman, Pound, Joyce, and Hemingway. These and other writers have traveled along the romantic road anticipated by The Divine Comedy. Finally, the author suggests, the road may end in a labyrinth so far as the contemporary writer is concerned.

In his increasing concern with the problems of the self and of the mind, the poet has been forced to invent new modes and techniques, which as the author demonstrates, grow out of his response to the psychological and metaphysical preoccupations of his age.

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