Poetic Form

Michael D. Hurley combines a wide and interdisciplinary record of publishing in poetry and poetics with considerable experience as a teacher of close reading and practical criticism at Cambridge. His work is marked by an ambition to explore the relationship between what literature makes us feel and how it makes us think. His recent book on G. K. Chesterton was praised by one critic for being 'striking in the precision of its formal analysis and the elegance of its prose'. Michael O'Neill is a well-known critic of poetry whose writings include monographs on Shelley (1989), Romanticism and the self-conscious poem (1997) and the twentieth- and twenty-first century literary legacies of Romantic poetry (2007). He edited the Cambridge History of English Poetry (2010) and a much-praised anthology of Romantic poetry with detailed comments on poetic form (2008). He has published two collections of poems and received a Cholmondeley Award for Poets in 1990. His work has been celebrated by many critics for its sensitivity to poetry and its ability to find an answerable language for poetic effects.

• Introduction; 1. The elements of poetic form; 2. Lyric; 3. The sonnet; 4. Elegy; 5. Epic; 6. Soliloquy; 7. Dramatic monologue; 8. Ballad and narrative.

'Michael Hurley and Michael O'Neill's Poetic Form: An Introduction offers an overview of the study of poetic form, including controversies. This clearly written and engaging text includes chapters on lyric; on the sonnet and elegy as subsets of lyric; on drama in the guise of the soliloquy and dramatic monologue, and finally on ballad and narrative.' Victorian Poetry