Dimensions
163 x 242 x 31mm
The idea for Ian Hamilton's unorthodox new book was sparked by a rereading of Samuel Johnson's classic 'Lives Of The English Poets'. Johnson included appraisals of fifty-two poets but of these only a tiny handful - four or five, perhaps - are still remembered. What, then, of the twentieth century? How many English-language poets of that epoch will we be admiring two hundred years from now? How many will resist oblivion?
Hamilton takes forty-five dead twentieth-century poets and offers a personal - and sometimes highly critical - response to each of them. And in the process he constructs a portrayal of what the living of a twentieth-century "poetic life" has actually involved.
Examples of each candidate's verse accompany Hamilton's prose text, so that 'Against Oblivion' can be taken as an informal introduction to twentieth-century poetry, or as a basis for critical dispute, or as a useful and provocative anthology: three books-in-one.
