Promotional Information

Received blanket review coverage on hardback publication Increasing popularity of poetry: Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters was a No.1 bestseller Radio series to coincide with hardback publication Hardback edition has already been reprinted 'The most extraordinary general literary performance of 1998... What I like most about this book is its sheer neck. ...A book to put into the hands of any young man or woman beginning to be aware of the glory of our language' The Scotsman 'Lives of the Poets is a seductive masterpiece, to be savoured alike for its vigilant profundity and for it sustained freshness. Who will do as much for prose fiction as Schmidt has for poetry?' Sunday Times.

About the Author

Michael Schmidt is Professor of Poetry at the University of Glasgow. He edits the magazine PN Review and is the founder and editorial director of Carcanet Press. He has translated poems and essays by the Mexican writer Octavio Paz.

Reviews

Editor and publisher Schmidt proposes to examine the range and possibilities of poetry in English as it zigzags across history, geography, and political and national divides. The book is organized historically in a series of biographical sketches that stretch from Richard Rolle of Hampole and John Barbour to Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Les Murray. Schmidt uses the poetry of the past and of the present to offer insight into each other. While deeply informed, Schmidt's discussion eschews any specific critical perspective, offering brief biographical sketches and a focus on the uses and innovations of language. His concern is to illuminate the poem rather than to explain it. Like Dr. Johnson's famous book, which provides Schmidt with his title, Lives of the Poets is both rich in its discernment and a pleasure to read.ÄThomas L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll., Savannah, GA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Using Samuel Johnson's 18th-century Lives of the Poets as a blueprint, this exhaustive survey treks through 600 years of mostly British poetry in English, from Wycliffe and Wyatt to Andrew Motion and Les Murray. In each of 64 chapters crammed with juicy anecdotes ("The kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips," reported an enraptured Oscar Wilde upon meeting his idol), Schmidt moves from biography to formal techniques to cultural reception. He focuses, for example, on what Donald Davie liked about Robert Burns, or Pound admired in Chaucer; on how "a living poem can engage another poem at five hundred years' distance, or across the other side of the world." While some would argue that a couple of pages summarizing The Canterbury Tales or The Prelude is insufficient, the book is more of a gathering of friends and rivals than a comprehensive companion. Schmidt, the founder of London's influential Carcanet Press (distributed here by Paul and Co.), has an intuitive sense of organizationÄone sequence from Wallace Stevens to Marianne Moore to Elizabeth Bishop is smoothly connected and riveting. Throughout his tour, he lingers at major moments in political, religious and social history to show how poets have used the resources of language to respond to their respective pressures. Recently rediscovered women poets such as Emilia Lanyer, Charlotte Smith and Mina Loy receive ample attention, and 20th-century trends and movements (imagism, vorticism, confessionalism, language poetry, etc.) are forcefully elucidated. Schmidt's interest in the history of publishing shadows the main narrative, allowing the reader to emerge with greater appreciation for those publishers who gambled on their taste to disseminate the work of history's most scandalous, reclusive and devoted wordsmiths. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.