Resumen
Resumen de Seis siglos de poesía inglesa
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About 5 h 10 min to read.Para quién es
For readers who love to read poems aloud, who like a guide that moves from Tennyson back to Chaucer, and who enjoy meeting singers, satirists and storytellers in short, memorable pieces.
De qué trata este libro
What if you could meet a poem before you ever meet its history? James Baldwin, who died in 1925, gathers poems from Chaucer in the fourteenth century to Tennyson in the nineteenth. Each poet gets a short life, a few lines of critical opinion, and a list of further reading. His belief is simple. A student who has felt the poems first will find the history a delight. So you begin with Tennyson and step back through the centuries, meeting a lady in a tower, a nightingale in the dark, and a Scottish farmer who crushes a daisy.
En este resumen
- 1Read the poems before the historyFree
- 2Tennyson turns pictures into music
- 3Wordsworth finds wonder in plain things
- 4Coleridge and Shelley sing of spells and light
- 5Keats gives beauty a heartbeat
- 6Burns and Cowper speak for ordinary hearts
- 7The eighteenth century polishes the art
- 8The seventeenth century moves from song to polish
- 9The earliest voices ring with Shakespeare and Chaucer
Idea clave 1 de 9
Read the poems before the history
Baldwin begins with a plain claim. Poetry itself is a richer subject than the story of how poetry came to be. A full history would start with Anglo-Saxon verse and Beowulf and follow the blending of tongues after the Norman Conquest. But such a study belongs after a student has read widely.
So the order of reading is the surprise. You start with Tennyson, whose beauty is plain even to casual readers. Then you step back through the centuries, and by the time Chaucer arrives, sympathy has been built up.
He also gives a method for each poem. Memorize it, read it aloud, discuss it as a whole, study each stanza, and read it once more. Grammar drills and word hunts, he warns, can crowd out the poem.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Go deeper: the whole of Seis siglos de poesía inglesa
About 5 h 10 min to read.Questions about Seis siglos de poesía inglesa
Why does the book begin with Tennyson instead of Chaucer?
Baldwin thinks readers learn best by going from the familiar to the unfamiliar. Tennyson's beauty is easy to hear, so readers begin there, then work back through the centuries and reach Chaucer well prepared.
Which poets and poems can I find in this anthology?
You find Tennyson's Lady of Shalott, Wordsworth's Ode, Coleridge's Christabel, Shelley's Skylark, Keats's Nightingale, Burns, Gray, Pope, Dryden, Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, old ballads, and Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.