of British poetry is one of conversations between poets, both the living and the dead.
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In rethinking the boundaries of British poetry, the authors of the twenty-six chapters that follow have used a wide range of critical approaches. Some, like Elizabeth S. Donno in "Varieties of Sixteenth-Century Narrative" and Cary H. Plotkin in "Victorian Religious Poetry" have approached their subject in terms of genre or kind. Others, like George D. Economou in "Chaucer," have focused on single poets. For Carole Silver, in her chapter, ''Pre-Raphaelite" poetry, a literary movement provides the organizing principle. For David Daiches, in his chapter, "Poetry in Scots," it is a national literature that proves central; for Edna Longley, it is that poets of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland celebrate powers inherited from Britons, rather than from Angles, Saxons, or Jutes. Many of the authors describe groupings of poets: Richard Feingold offers a venerable pairing in "Dryden and Pope," while Jerome H. Buckley, crossing the divide that usually isolates the Romantics from the Victorians, considers Wordsworth and Tennyson in tandem. And while some scholars have accepted more traditional chronological periods, they have chosen to do so in markedly untraditional ways; perhaps the most striking example of this is Margaret Anne Doody's revisionist "Poetry of the Eighteenth Century." The kind of critical dialogue to be found both within and between these chapters is made most explicit in Jerome McGann's chapter, "Poetry, 17851832," which consists of a conversation among three speakers. And the story of the material history of published poetrywonderfully illuminated by David McKitterick in his chapter, "Printing and Distribution of Poetry"is representative of the sustained interest throughout this volume in how poetry has circulated, and continues to circulate, among its readers. What Milton said of the fallen angels holds true of the contributors to this volume: "Thir Song was partial." Partial because any scholar's account of British poetry is necessarily biased, idiosyncratic, and characterized by theoretical independence; partial, too, in the sense that such narratives must be incomplete, fragmentary, and subject to change, even as conceptions of the traditions explored in this volume change in response to cultural and critical pressures.
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One thing all these authors share is a deep sense of the social rootedness of poetry, of the reciprocal relationship between British poetry and British culture: they remind us that poetry is a social record of the kinds of events ordinarily excluded from the histories written of various
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