A Little History of Poetry (Little Histories) by John Carey (PDF)

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A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature–selected as the literature book of the year by the London Times “[A] fizzing, exhilarating book.”—Sebastian Faulks, Sunday Times, London“Delightful.’”—New York Times Book Review 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. But 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. For readers both young and old, this little history shines a light for readers on the richness of the world’s poems—and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “[The] book reviewer and Oxford don has great fun, galloping through 4,000 years of verse. Reputations are flayed and poetic gems are uncovered.”—Robbie Millen and Andrew Holgate, The Times and Sunday Times, “Best Books of 2020” “[A] fizzing, exhilarating book”—Sebastian Faulks, Sunday Times“Carey’s delightful survey never takes itself or its subject too seriously. ‘Over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten,’ he writes. ‘This is a book about some that have not.’”—New York Times Book Review“Don’t let the diminutive title fool you. This is an expansive, not to mention accessible, tour of poetry’s importance and evolution, from ‘Beowulf’ to Shakespeare to Maya Angelou and beyond.”—Washington Post 2020 Holiday Gift Guide“Few modern literature professors are capable of writing a book as interesting and mischievous as this.”—James Marriott, The Times ‘Best Literary Non-Fiction Books of 2020’“This supremely compact and erudite introduction doesn’t just pack in a bunch of facts and potted biographies, it somehow manages to convey the transcendent glory of the form through the ages, whether it’s sagas, hymns, ballads or verse…Carey is frighteningly well informed but always accessible, and this guide will offer riches whether you’re a total newbie or a poetry buff.”—Sybille Bedford, The Sunday Times ‘Best Literary Books of 2020′ “In this clever, wide-ranging history, British literary critic Carey provides a tour of Western poetry, from Homer to Maya Angelou. Each brief chapter tackles one or more poets representative of a particular era, with excerpts from their works, brief accounts of their lives, and Carey’s insightful critical commentaries. . . . Those looking for a shrewdly condensed and accessible history of poetry could not ask for a better guide.”—Publishers Weekly“A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray. . . . Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.”—Kirkus Reviews“An Oxford don, John Carey has a remarkably unpretentious and encyclopedic knowledge of names, places, poems, poets, and poetic moments and movements, which he evinces while offering a subtle critique of modernist obscurity.”—James P. Lenfestey, Rain Taxi“Warm in tone, informative, generous in its sympathies, inviting in its choices, with a clear emphasis on human stories underpinning poetic achievement.”—Emma Smith, author of This is Shakespeare“This wonderfully positive and vivid history is a delight on every page … Carey’s sparkling Little History of Poetry is an astonishingly full introduction to English poetry from Beowulf to the present, set in a framework extending in place and time from Gilgamesh to Akhmatova and Seferis.”—Bernard O’Donoghue, Winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award“Here is an informative, fast-moving book … Like Carey’s previous works, it’s forceful as well as clear, and it’s populist, no-nonsense and anti-elite in its sympathies. Many people may find new favourites here.”—Stephanie Burt, Professor of English, Harvard University“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.”—Daljit Nagra, author of Look We Have Coming to Dover!“An elegant history of poetry, what it is, what it does, why it matters, written in an authoritative and engaging voice. Masterly.”—Ruth Padel, author of 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem About the Author 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 best-seller.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐As befitting its subject – Poetry (the Force of Few Words) – Carey’s succinct survey of Eight Centuries’ Verse provides insights to each poet without getting bogged down in Bio-blurb or Critical mumbo-jumbo! This book is a reader’s delight & constitutes, as a whole, a definite adjunct to the Muse’s Diadem.

⭐The title of this book should be: “A chronology of Anglo-‘American’ poets and how a few other poets are seen from this perspective.”In the Hegelian sense, a History as the cohesively conscious force collectively guiding a people could be tentatively written only about societies at large and, generally, more and more these days, about humanity as a whole; which is made manifestly obvious in this book in how poets and poetic movements influence each other to an extent which makes you wonder at times if poets are really the avant-garde of social consciousness or they are being framed by “officially authorized narratives” floating on a people’s shared consciousness (think of the NY Times with their: “all that is fit to print” and “we the people” don’t even get their inside joke) and/or are poets cleverhansing themselves into their own functional illusions and all those “isms” by previous developments? Solzhenitsyn said: “for a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones”. I think he was too harsh on outright open day-light “regimes” and he seemed to be talking about some sort of diabolic symbiosis. Go to page 230 on this book: “‘American’ Modernism”, to what extent is that “ism”, like pragmatism, a product of the incurable gringo protagonism?Humberto Eco in one of the most intellectually charged jokes I have ever read points out that “we the people” don’t realize “Descartes demons” are actually politicians, police, … He has pointed out that after Aristotle’s Poetic nothing really of importance has been figured out regarding the inner workings of metaphors. Ancient Greeks were obsessed with like ratios. It was their main conceptual tool for all kinds of engineering and social technologies. Aristotle would “explain” poetry (something like (I don’t remember the exact one liner actually included in his “Physics” (I think))): “the eyes are to the body what the mind is to the soul”. So out of those types of conceptual parallelisms metaphors are brought about by “cross multiplying” and some syntactic pruning: “the eyes of your soul” (meaning “your mind”). I thought as part of the story line of this “history” an attempt would be made at “explaining” poetry going back to Aristotle. I was very wrong. It was written following a template: what the author sees as a poetic period as a title for the chapter + a few lines about the authors’ bio + some lines of their poetry and some (more or less self-serving) “explaining”, including some forensic “mind reading”. I would have removed the drawings starting each chapter (serving what purpose?).There are flagrant (intended?) inaccuracies in this book from which I would just cite the one that I found monumental. Page 282, “Poets in Politics”: Nazism didn’t happen as a “reaction” to communism in Russia. Those “isms” happen for their own intrinsic reasons. If anything it was a reaction to the attempt by European imperial powers to exclude Germany from their party and even trying to turn Germany into their “negritos”, as well. Closing the paragraph author points out that after WWII many countries got rid of their colonial masters. So Nazism seemed to have done some good. European imperial powers got a taste of their own medicine.An underlying tenet of “Western civilization” is that it is OK to exploit, genocidally engage people who can’t defend themselves on an equal basis: you talk yourself into believing that you are just “freedom loving”, “greater gooding”, … them and feeling great about it, the “Good Christian” you are. Comparatively speaking, the U.S. government has greatly surpassed the genocide of Nazi Germany, even though Nazis were killing people on an industrial scale (all you need is 3rd grade Math to show it to yourself). “The land of the free and the brave …” is the country with the highest incarceration rate. Besides, what do those stanzas on Patrick Henry’s mind, voice and times have to do with current day USA? The U.S. has become like a cross between Soviet era odd jokes and George Orwell’s “1984”. As a published poet myself at times I have had the chance to talk to poets and song writers about such matters. Why is it that there are no vibrant protest songs as it happened in the 60’s, more “question authority” poetry these days? Where are the Juvenal kinds of poets raising such matters to collective consciousness?Poetry is kind of a taboo topic for linguists. The authoring, cultural and societal dynamics motivating poetic expression deserves more study. There is also lots of poetry in prose. Solzhenitsyn, himself an officer during WWII and a visceral critic of the excesses and abuses by Russian soldiers was shocked to have gringos tell him that they had done Russia the favor of saving them from Germany! I have dreamed about that book Solzhenitsyn should have written with Dostoevskyan overtones about how and why the most novel ideals end up being corrupted and how easy that is.Solzhenitsyn’s truism is way too simplistic and I think he definitely had the brains and experiences to treat us better. After Bob Dylan finally accepted the Nobel price for Literature (a Grammy and other) I wonder to which extent it was because he is some gringo. Compare for example, Sting’s “Roxanne” lyrics with “Princesita” by el B/los Aldeanos (youtube oBF9thS534M); Bob Dylan’s with Silvio Rodríguez’!The best poem I read in the book? The very last one on the last page of the book by Less Murray!

⭐I’m disappointed by this book. It contains good portraits of individual poets, but such portraits are available elsewhere for free. And the book is not really a history of poetry. It uses terms such as “modernism” and “romanticism” in chapter titles, but it doesn’t define them and doesn’t list them in the index. It also lacks a glossary. So the reader learns about poets, but only obliquely about the history of poetry. In addition, while one can always quarrel with the author’s choices re the inclusion and description of poets, his choices seem inadequate at times. It’s inadequate, for example, to describe Richard Wilbur in one paragraph (p. 259) and leave the impression that he was just a World War II poet. To sum up, it’s a series of portraits of poets, but not a history of poetry.

⭐I like to read. I like poetry. Not a huge fan of the book. I didn’t bother finishing it.

⭐I found it impossible to stay invested in the book. I don’t think the format suits the topic; I love it for say, science, like what Bryson did years ago. But for poetry, this felt too fast and transactional.

⭐This book offers a wealth of biographical insight into poets, stretching back beyond Homer, but without getting caught up in the minutiae of full biographies. Rather, it’s more about presenting tidbits of information that help uncover why a given poet’s verse is as it is – both mixing an understanding of where the world was during that poet’s time and what the individual was going through. But that’s not all the book does. It also shows the reader how poetry changed over the centuries, how changes in society influenced poetry, and – sometimes — how poetry influenced society.If covering poetry from “The Epic of Gilgamesh” through poets of the 20th century in a book with the word “little” in the title seems impossible, it is. It’s done in this volume by being English language poetry-centric. (Some might prefer to call it Western-centric because it discusses the likes of Ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as some German, French, Russian, and Italian poets, but these discussions are largely in the context of those poets interacting in the larger world of poetry.) That is, while it discusses foreign language poetry, it’s mostly with respect to poetry that influenced (or in some cases was influenced by) English-language poets. This focus is most profoundly seen in the book’s dalliances with Asian poetry, which are few and brusque. The book discusses a few Chinese poets as well as Japanese haiku poets, but explicitly in the context of how they influenced Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound. (Also influencing the minimal mark of Indian and Zen schools of poetry is the fact that the Beat poets were lost from the selection process as well.) The only other noteworthy mention of poetry of Asian origin is about Rabindranath Tagore, mostly because he was a Nobel Laureate and was globally prominent enough to influence poets of the English-speaking world (most of his work was originally in Bengali, though he did a lot of his own translations to English.)The previous paragraph is not so much of a criticism as it might sound. It’s clear that any book that opts to take on an artform with as much longevity and universality as poetry in a single compact volume is going to have to be highly selective. However, I wouldn’t want anyone entering into the book thinking they would learn something about where Norse poetry or Hungarian poetry or Arab Ghazals (none of which bears a substantial mention) fit in the broader poetic scheme, and I can see how someone from an African or Asian tradition would come away offended by the lack of acknowledgement of global poetry. In short, what the book does, I felt it does very well, but its title could make people think it’s a different book than it is.As a history, the book’s forty chapters are, quite logically, chronologically arranged. However, there are sometimes overlapping time periods because of how poets are thematically grouped. Each chapter shines a light on anywhere from one to about twenty poets (two or three is most common) who were exemplars of the time period. Generally, the chapters describe key details about each poet and his or her place in the art, and then dissects a particularly important work or two from said poet. Except in the case of a few short form pieces, whole poems aren’t presented, but rather illustrative lines or stanzas. (In many cases, I found myself pulling up whole poems on the internet because of curiosity that Carey aroused. Except for a few of the most recent poems, almost all the works discussed are in the public domain, and can be readily accessed.)I learned a great deal from this book, and I was turned on to some poets that I hadn’t thought much about before by learning of their lives. I’ll definitely be reading more Spender, Wheatley, Auden, and Rossetti. There are many poets I’ve read without any touch of biographical insight beyond a vague notion of when they lived, and so it was interesting to gain an inkling of the world of each.If you’re interested in poetry or the history of literature, I’d highly recommend this book. While it is English language-centric, if one approaches it knowing that, I think you’ll find it well worth your time.

⭐This is an absolutely brilliant book. I had a poor formal education (army father – too many schools) but have always read a great deal and have virtually educated myself as a result. I came late to poetry – but found much to love. Robert Browning (now a great favourite), the Lakeland poets, Whitman and more. Nevertheless, I always felt I was skimming the surface and could never hope to understand the great classical poets like Chaucer and Donne. John Carey brings all of these to light – in such an clear and easy manner – I read his book like a novel turning the pages with baited breath – excited to enjoy and learn more. I have now fearlessly ordered books by poets I would not have had the confidence to approach before. I might even attempt Beowulf. Carey’s book should be on every school’s curriculum. It would have brought so much guidance, wisdom, wonder, insight, consolation, romance and confidence into my own life at a more important and formative age. How sad to discover all this when you are long past your sell by date – instead of at the very brink of adult life. Thank you Mr Carey.

⭐John Carey is one of our most astute critics, and his views come with the authority of decades of scholarship. So this book was always going to be an authoritative overview of the currents of western poetry – a description which might sound worthy, but dull. But what Carey has as well – and what makes this book so special – is a surprisingly innocent, even childlike, delight in poetry. It’s infectious – he seizes on individual phrases, on lines of verse, on the treatment of ideas, and holds them up for us to see and enjoy, and in a little while we find ourselves doing the same. It’s a book less about the history of poetry than about the enjoyment of poetry. Anyone who knows little about poetry but wants to try it out couldn’t start from a better place, and anyone who loves poetry already but thinks that there might be more to learn – and who could love poetry without thinking that there might be more to learn? – will find encouragement here. But be warned – if you start on this book and follow every new path that it opens up for you, it will be many, many months before you finish.

⭐This April and May, the ambiguities of lockdown have been softened for me by the gradual reading of John Carey’s exhilarating guide, this ‘Little History.’ From The Epic of Gilgamesh to the poetry of Seamus Heany and Maya Angelou, Carey gives us background and small excerpts of mostly Western poems, hymns and ballads, some Goethe and Rilke, Pushkin, Akhmatova, Amichai, Zbigniew Herbert et al. Having studied literature quite a long time ago, I found the chapters nostalgic reminders, but I also learnt new things. The phrase Carpe Diem (seize the day) comes from Horace, Donne’s contemporaries called him ‘Copernicus in Poetry,’ I had never heard of Arthur Hugh Clough, or Langston Hughes.My daughter too has enjoyed this book and whereas she thought Carey was too hard on Dante, she felt inspired to start reading Ovid. You don’t have to agree with the professor’s views, he may not spend as much time as you like on your favourite poet (he didn’t stint too much on Herbert, Donne, Yeats) but what a feat, to make these choices and create such pleasurable-to-read sections, with attractive lino-cut illustrations by Nick Morley at the head of each chapter. I think this Little History may inspire its readers to seek out more poetry, new and old, but it is a quietly exciting read in itself.

⭐John Carey’s new book, A Little History of Poetry of 80,000 words, does what it says on the tin, but takes poetry back all the way to Gilgamesh in Assyria, all the way up to Les Murray. As he’s aiming at a teenage audience, he is selective about what to include, he quotes snippets, lines, snatches of verse of poets he thinks (selected by time) important. He left out ‘boring theory and technical terms, using anecdotes to bring the poets to life.’ Valuation and lastingness are interdependent. He upgrades some that have been marginalized, as in women poets and ballads, and downgrades others. He includes major foreign poets who he read (sometimes the 1st time) in translation, although knowing French and learning German (for Rilke, who came as some surprise). He dislikes Dante, though he wrote beautiful poetry, his depiction of hell” suggests an obsessive interest in cruelty and torture. I don’t see how you can read that and simply admire the lovely poetry. It is a bit like saying the gas chambers were terribly well designed.” He quotes a whole stanza of Arnold’s Dover Beach because it’s the one he’d like to read out. He loves Larkin, especially Church Going, which he sees as a great religious poem. In the modern world he admires Auden and Hughes, seeing Crow as his definitive work. He praises the top 20th century poet Eliot for his astonishing production of wonderful phrases:” Measure out my life with coffee spoons,” “death in a handful of dust “, “not with a bang but a whimper”.He starts off with a memorable definition: “Poetry relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special, so that it will be valued and remembered.” He says no one can define why a great poem is great, he follows his own opinion. He drew up a list of poets he hadn’t read, because he didn’t have time for: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lorca, Goethe, Akhmatova, Gilgamesh, Homer, Sappho, Dante, Petrarch. He has had a lifetime of teaching literature, has written books on the pleasures of reading the novel, on Donne, Milton and William Golding. As he had to cherry pick great lines, he had to concentrate on what words really mattered. Thomas Hardy blames his wife for not telling him she was dying; “Never to say goodbye or lip me the softest call.” Finding ‘lip’ a wonderful word. Yeats (like Milton and Donne) is given his own chapter. He quotes the magnificent “what rough beast its hour come round at last slouches towards Bethlehem to be born:” Street language to help convey the collapse of European civilization in the Second Coming. What he said about Dante applies to Milton too. Milton paints Satan as heroic. Milton is classed as second in importance to Shakespeare. He quotes from several of the sonnets, and from the whole of no.116 “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.” But he finds nothing in Shakespeare as sensual as in Marlowe. He loves the American revolutionaries Whitman and Dickinson, both opposites, both new word creators.The beating heart of the book is devoted to the many anonymous authors, including Homer, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Night, where Carey is dealing with ‘Gods, Heroes and Monsters, War, Adventure and Love’, including along the way Anglo-Saxon poetry(with its admixture of Christianity and paganism) and the Latin classics(Virgil, Horace, Ovid et al,). Carey’s plain-man down-to-earth style sheers through all this with delight, aplomb and vigour. He retells the stories and tales with a good background in history and fact. The next step leads to our first leading national poet both medieval and European (1343-1400), Chaucer, weaving French and Italian into his poetry. He spoke several languages and travelled widely in France, Italy and Spain, and may have met Petrarch and Boccaccio, whose Decameron became a model for The Canterbury Tales. He was a courtier, diplomat, civil servant and soldier. Chaucer, Carey says, is funny, unlike Dante and Petrarch, writing about the different levels of society and how they interact; is genial, showing all life-humans, animals, the green world- is bonded together by Nature. To him ‘nature’ is part of God’s world. He wonders if humans have free will, likes astrology as well as being a Christian. Carey says Chaucer’s greatest completed poem is Troilus and Criseyde (Canterbury tales were never completed) from a Boccaccio poem. The love story set in the Trojan War shines with images from the natural world .If love-making is natural, and nature is God’s creation, why should lovers not be seen as holy? He modifies his sources (in this case Dante)., quotes from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Boethius and Boccaccio. Chaucer’s humanity never blames Criseyde for being unfaithful. Troilus is killed and his soul flies up, looking back at ‘this little spot of earth’: he laughs at the triviality of human life compared to heavenly truth. He singles out The Miller’s tale, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale and The Knight’s tale as being his favourites from The Canterbury Tales. He loves the characterization, the structure, the dirty jokes, the construction of the scenes. This poem highlights the profiteering in the Catholic Church leading a century later to the Protestant Reformation. In Langland’s Piers Plowman these political and social ideas are paramount, taken up by the leaders of the Peasant’s Revolt. After living a life of the flesh for 45 years, he lived in the manner of a ‘mendicant’ many years after. The dominant theme is a contrast between rich and poor. Christ and his disciples were poor. Will remembers how the poor suffered in famine years and prays for them. As a religious poet he’s unusual, using enquiry and questioning rather than awe or worship.There are several times when things changed drastically. Donne was born in the great age of the theatre, reflects subjects open to the wide world, a “new philosophy”, he loves argument: the century before Donne was the discovery of America (“Oh my America, my New found land “) and Copernicus. Things changed because of the way Protestantism changed the way people thought of themselves: self-examination and the ability to choose which religious line to follow. The metaphysicals, Herbert, Traherne and Vaughan, could have worshipped different gods. We have the shift at the start of the 18th century of power from the court to parliament. We get political parties, the reading of magazines, coffee houses, Grub Street. This allows Pope and Addison to flourish, writing about politics. There were huge changes in the 19th century of European population, also elementary education for everyone- a new mass literate public. Some, despised it ( Baudelaire,” the mob have invaded the palace of my heart”), other wrote for it (H.G.Wells). This launched the idea poetry should be difficult, appealing only to the educated minority. Carey thinks this idea was damaging (a theme he wrote about in The Intellectuals and the Masses). Baudelaire, though a symbolist is still clear, but it’s harder to decipher what Rimbaud is saying. Eliot loved Mallarme, Laforgue’s free verse and benefited from the symbolists. Carey also groups Dylan Thomas with the symbolists (“altar-wise by owlight lies”), but he learned in his best poems to write intelligibly-“Do not go gentle into that good night..”, “ In my craft and sullen art.”Carey is not able to detach the morality of a poet from their poem (as in the New Criticism), and doesn’t always pardon a poet for writing well, if the message he is trying to convey is objectionable: Pound is a case in point. Although the Cantos are wonderful in parts, he doesn’t admire them, being deeply flawed by anti-Semitism. Also Swift is objectionable when writing about women and their bodies, so he is given only one paragraph. Poetry was once the central art form, but was displaced in what it once did over the years by the novel. Then the novel carries the weight of concentrated issues. So it’s how poetry says it as much as what it says. Take Coleridge’s Kublai Khan (said by some to be the greatest poem in the English language) – does it make sense? No, but it’s not nonsense. Wallace Stevens dismissed belief in God, and believed that in poetry imagination was redemptive force. So when he writes the “only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream,” his fusion of weird words, emperor with ice-cream is unintelligible but spirited for the imagination. Browning’s The Ring and the Book is magnificent: the impossibility of truth. He writes the dramatic monologue, which he learned from Donne, a great poet, who adopts alarmingly different viewpoints about women and sex and so on. He places Hughes and Plath together in a chapter headed Fatal Attraction. Although he rates Hughes’s poetry above hers, Hughes owed his success to her, typing up his poems and sending them off etc. Plath’s greatest poems, the tragic last ones, Lady Lazarus, Daddy, were written after she’d been deserted by him, writing them early mornings when the kids were asleep, “in God’s intestine”. Carey admits, he could have started with nursery rhymes to show the origins of poetry rather than Gilgamesh. Reads like a novel and cuts away the fustian fog surrounding poetry by a good speaker.

⭐The clue is in the title: while physically no smaller than most books, this is a light weight, easily digestible read. Few of us are well-versed enough (forgive the pun) to carry 4,000 years of poetry in our heads, and this provides us with an excellent overview. The tone is engaging enough to read the book straight through, if you wish, with pleasure and provides an informative reference source thereafter. I bought it to give me an insight into the history of free verse in general and e e cummings in particular; sadly there is no information on either, hence the four stars. But I still don’t regret the purchase – after all, what else is Wikipedia for?

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