Peter Murphy

The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem

Reading and Remembering Thomas Wyatt

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Thomas Wyatt didn't publish "They Flee from Me." It was written in a notebook, maybe abroad, maybe even in prison. Today it is in every poetry anthology. How did it survive? In vivid and compelling detail, Murphy tells the story of the accidents of fate that kept a great poem alive across 500 turbulent years.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. August 2019
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 226mm x 152mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 431g
• ISBN-13: 9781503609280
• ISBN-10: 1503609286
• Artikelnr.: 53537167

Autorenporträt

Peter Murphy is John Hawley Roberts Professor of English at Williams College.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Part I: Thomas Wyatt Writes a Poem and Shows It to Others
chapter abstract
The first section of the First Part is about the making of "They Flee from
Me" and its participation in the daily life of people nearby. It focuses on
the manuscript books in which "They Flee from Me" is first recorded, the
"Egerton" and "Devonshire" manuscripts, and describes the performance and
transformation of traditional poetic modes that Thomas Wyatt accomplishes.
It then moves to a discussion of the first printing of the poem in Tottel's
Miscellany. This part ends with a discussion of the poem's lapsing out of
culture and memory, conducted by considering a seventeenth-century user of
the Egerton manuscript who wrote over and crossed out many of the poems.
Broader questions about the functions of poetry are raised through a
consideration of some algebra written next to the poem and a comparison of
the languages of poetry and mathematics.
Part II: A Century of Learning, and the Invention of Literature
chapter abstract
The Second Part begins by discussing the first reprinters of Thomas Wyatt's
poetry, circa 1720, and uses these reprintings to present the many
challenges and impossibilities involved in trying to represent the past
accurately. It then moves to the story of the main focus of the Second
Part, the eighteenth-century cleric and editor Thomas Percy, whose career
provides an opportunity to show how reprinting old poetry gets entangled
with the eighteenth-century project of nation and empire building. The
troubled nature of Percy's work is dramatized through his bitter conflict
with Joseph Ritson, a rival editor and a fierce, contrarian Jacobin. Percy
also writes on the page in the Egerton manuscript on which "They Flee from
Me" appears, and meditation on this use of the manuscript allows for
broader consideration of issues of editing, printing, poetry, and personal
ambition.
Part III: More Learning, the British Library, and the Song of the Professor
chapter abstract
The Third Part traces the profound reanimation of old poetry that coincides
with the invention of English Literature as a school subject. The first
section of this part concerns George Frederic Nott, a gifted editor who
comprehensively reprinted Wyatt's poetry and "They Flee from Me" along the
way. Further reflection on the life of the Egerton manuscript provides a
context for the entry of the manuscript into the British Library, its
current home. This part concludes by discussing the work of Arthur
Quiller-Couch, the editor of the Oxford Book of English Verse and the first
Professor of English at Cambridge University. The modern University and its
associated culture is depicted as a new kind of Court, and the Professor as
a new kind of (cultural) courtier, using poetry as the subject and object
of ambition.
Part IV: Coming to America and Making it Big
chapter abstract
In the twentieth century "They Flee from Me" becomes the Wyatt poem people
know and reprint, when it becomes a kind of hero of the burgeoning industry
of English teaching. This Part describes the full maturation of academic
culture in the twentieth-century United States and the important place the
study of old poetry was given in this culture. It focuses on Cleanth
Brooks, a Yale English Professor who put "They Flee from Me" in his
profoundly influential first textbook, in 1936. This Part argues that while
methods have changed since the demise of Brooks and his "New" criticism,
the reading and reprinting of old poetry are still primarily driven by the
elaborate culture of testing, evaluation, and moral instruction, both for
Professors and for students, resident in the contemporary education
industry. The last reprinting considered at length is that of Stephen
Greenblatt, in his era-creating Renaissance Self-Fashioning.
Conclusions
chapter abstract
The final part meditates on several of the big questions that have been in
play throughout the book. Is an old poem a form of heritable knowledge? Do
people get "better" at poetry? Is it possible to be "right" when saying
what an old poem is about and what function it had in the past? What kind
of object does an old poem become when it is the target of schooling and
evaluation? It argues that the reprinting of old poetry is always
instrumental and always both wrong and right about the abject and
triumphant individual old poem. It argues that "They Flee from Me" survived
because it functions so well in the environment of the school and
university-and that is because this environment is so similar to the
(deadly, interesting) environment of Henry VIII's court.