Reading Old Friends: Essays, Reviews, and Poems on Poetics 1975-1990

John Matthias

Feb 1992 · State University of New York Press

About this ebook

Reading Old Friends includes essays, reviews, and poems on poetics. Matthias, who has spent much time in England, concentrates on British poetry ranging from late modernist figures such as David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid to contemporaries such as Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Michael Hamburger, and John Fuller. He also seeks to establish, or re-establish, meaningful trans-Atlantic connections between Wendell Berry and Jeremy Hooker, for example, or between Robert Duncan and David Jones. Other, more generally acknowledged figures, are also discussed, including Wordsworth, Pope, Crabbe, Constable, Turner, Britten, Tippet, Lowell, Auden, and Berryman. The book also contains three poems on poetics that engage many of the theoretical issues left implicit in most of the essays.

About the author

John Matthias is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and has been Visiting Fellow in poetry at Clare Hall, Cambridge. His six volumes of poetry include Turns, Crossing, Northern Summer: New and Selected Poems, and A Gathering of Ways. He has co-translated Contemporary Swedish Poetry, and The Battle of Kosovo, and he has edited 23 Modern British Poets, Introducing David Jones, and David Jones: Man and Poet. He has received awards from the Columbia University Translation Center, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Society of Midland Authors, and the Poetry Society of America. His poems and essays appear regularly in many American and British journals, and his work has been translated into Swedish, Dutch, French, German, Greek , and Serbo-Croatian.