A Little History of Poetry

By: John Carey

Narrated by: Ralph Lister

The Bookseller (UK) Editor's Choice

A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work - over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not.

John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem “great” in the first place. This little history shines a light on the richness and variation of the world’s poems - and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.

©2020 John Carey (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing

Great anthology of poetry

A chronological anthology of poetry throughout history beginning with the Iliad and venturing through the Middle Ages on up to the modern times in modern poets. A great book to wet your whistle on poetry and also for those who have loved poetry for years excellent book.