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Sign up todayA Little History of Poetry
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Learn moreA vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature
What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work—over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not.
John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem “great” in the first place. This little history shines a light on the richness and variation of the world’s poems—and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.
John Carey is emeritus professor at Oxford. His books include The Essential “Paradise Lost,” What Good Are the Arts?, studies of Donne and Dickens, and a biography of William Golding. The Unexpected Professor, his memoir, was a Sunday Times bestseller.
Ralph Lister is an experienced actor and voice artist who trained at LAMDA. He spent fifteen years in mainstage theatre in London, Madrid, Hong Kong, and Edinburgh before moving to America, where he focuses on film, television, and audiobook narration.
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Audiobook details
Author:
John Carey
Narrator:
Ralph Lister
ISBN:
9781094152356
Length:
9 hours 51 minutes
Language:
English
Publisher:
Blackstone Publishing
Publication date:
July 21, 2020
Edition:
Unabridged
Libro.fm rank:
#20,286 Overall
Genre rank:
#107 in Poetry
Reviews
“Clever, wide-ranging…Those looking for a shrewdly condensed and accessible history of poetry could not ask for a better guide.”
“Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.”
“In this tenth book in Yale’s splendid Little Histories series… the eminent Oxford literature professor and chief Sunday Times critic spans 4,000 years with admirable concision as he reflects on some of the finest poems ever written.”
“This wonderfully positive and vivid history is a delight on every page…An astonishingly full introduction to English poetry from Beowulf to the present.”
“Books about poetry are rarely page turners, but Carey’s little history is gripping, is unputdownable! Reading this book and its galaxy of poets is like looking up at the sky and seeing the whole wheeling and constellated universe.”
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