Starting Lines in Scottish, Irish, and English Poetry
From Burns to Heaney
Fiona Stafford
Price: £83.00 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-818637-3
Publication date: 30 November 2000
368 pages, 216x138 mm
A sample of this book is available in PDF format
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| Reviews |
| - 'This is a work of mature scholarship; its references inform, delight and open new avenues of connectedness at every turn. It is also unpretentiously, generously written: the speaking voice and personal enthusiasms of the best kind of teacher hold interest across an impressively broad span of poetic analysis ... It is as persuasive an advocacy of the pleasure of poetry as I have read in years.' - Studies in Hogg and his World
- 'Enjoyable new book ... A ranging and attentive book, engaging in its particulars and suggestive in its implications.' - The Review of English Studies
- 'Stafford argues thoroughly and persuasively ... This book provides a fascinating model for readers of any poem that engages another across cultural and chronological boundaries, and for literary criticism as a whole.' - Scottish Studies Review
- 'Starting Lines
is a welcome contribution to a trend in which Scottish and Irish literatures are considered on their own terms ... Stafford offers refreshing close analysis ... The argument is lucidly presented, with careful structuring and logical progression signaled by useful transitions. Helpfully, each chapter opens with the full texts the poems being considered, and in each case the
poet's ideas and practices regarding quotation are fully examined.
' - Scottish Studies Review
- 'The introduction lays out a thorough, intelligent discussion of eighteenth-century constructions of originality, its associations with independence, and its role in Romantic aesthetic theory.' - Scottish Studies Review
- 'For anyone interested in poetic allusion the book is essential reading ... a challenging, acute and sometimes beautifully written account of that texture of historical, cultural, and textual relations that makes literary history.' - Notes and Queries
- 'One can only admire the scholarship and learning on display here ... one's understanding of the book's poems is enormously enhanced.' - Notes and Queries
- 'It is a tribute to the interest of this book that one could wish it considerably longer ... The author evidently set out to initiate avenues of approach to a fruitful territory of understanding between the three nations; and in this she has been triumphantly successful.' - The Wordsworth Circle
- '
The background reading is both wide-ranging and detailed, so that the poems are located on a series of interlocking maps, national and international. Nor does the author hesitate to venture into terra incognita
.
' - The Wordsworth Circle,
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| Description | | - An intriguing study of work by a wide-ranging choice of poets, from Burns and Coleridge to Carson, Coward, and Heaney.
- Close reading illuminates these poets' encounters with particular works by earlier poets - from other parts of the British Isles - and how the dynamics of both new text and source are affected by issues of nationhood and cultural tradition.
| Why should a poem begin with a line from another poem? Is an eighteenth-century epigraph working in the same way as a post-modern quotation? And how are the dynamics of the new text and the source affected by issues of nationhood, language, history, and cultural tradition? Are literary ideas of originality and imitation, allusion and influence inherently political if the poems emerge from
different sides of a border or of a colonial relationship?
Taking as a framework the history of relations between Ireland, England, and Scotland since the 1707 Union, the book explores such questions through a series of close readings. Textual encounters singled out for detailed discussion include Burns's use of Shakespeare, Coleridge's reference to 'Sir Patrick Spens', James Clarence Mangan's
adaptation of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ciaran Carson's quotation from John Keats, Seamus Heaney's meditation on Henry Vaughan, and the evolution of 'The Homes of England' from Felicia Hemans to Noel Coward.
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Readership: Scholars, students, and general readers interested in how poems work and how one poem can spark off another; and in nationalism as expressed through poetic choices.
| Contents |
1.
'What's Past is Prologue'
2.
ScottishBards and English Epigraphs: Robert Burns's 'A Winter Night'
3.
The Grand Old Ballad in Coleridge's 'Dejection'
4.
James Clarence Mangan and Percy Bysshe Shelley
5.
The Homes of England
6.
'The Irish for No'
7.
Seamus Heaney and the Caught Line
Epilogue: George Mackay Brown, 'All Soul's'
Conclusion: George Mackay Brown, 'All Soul's' (text of poem)
Bibliography
Index
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| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
Fiona Stafford, CUF Lecturer in English at Oxford University, and Fellow, Somerville College, Oxford
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