Listening to Poetry An Experiment in Total Stylistics

Listening to Poetry is not an academic monograph but an essay, in the etymological sense. Its aim is to make readers hear, as well as feel and see, the texture of English verse from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Its underlying assumption is that there is a line, straight or winding, leading from society through poet to style, and vice versa. It is of course impossible to demonstrate the existence of that line, but it is possible to take it for granted and trace its course, from Shakespeare to the poets of the Great War. Intended for a popular audience, and to be read in combination with Moro & the Silent Revolution's album Songs'n'Sonnets, this study amounts to a sketchy sensuous history of English poetry