Poetic Language: Theory and Practice from the Renaissance to the Present

In a series of 12 chapters, exemplary poems - by Walter Ralegh, William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, Frank O'Hara, Robert Creeley, W. S. Graham, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley and Thomas A. Clark - are read alongside theoretical discussions of poetic language. The discussions provide a jargon-free account of a wide range of historical and contemporary schools of thought about poetic language, and an organised, coherent critique of those schools.