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2 books match the query 'Early Poetry'

cover of Early Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert

Early Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert

Jaroslav Seifert

Northwestern University Press, 1997

Nobel Prize winner Jaroslav Seifert's poetry is strongly situated within the Czech literary tradition of Poetism, which evolved into a playful, light-hearted refuge from world history while maintaining an edge of social consciousness. Called "a living symbol of the continuity in modern Czech literature" by Václav Havel, Seifert remains a towering figure in European poetry more than a decade after his death.
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cover of The Early Poetry of Robert Graves: The Goddess Beckons

The Early Poetry of Robert Graves

The Goddess Beckons

By Frank L. Kersnowski

University of Texas Press, 2002

Like many men of his generation, poet Robert Graves was indelibly marked by his experience of trench warfare in World War I. The horrific battles in which he fought and his guilt over surviving when so many perished left Graves shell-shocked and disoriented, desperately seeking a way to bridge the rupture between his conventional upbringing and the uncertainties of postwar British society.

In this study of Graves's early poetry, Frank Kersnowski explores how his war neurosis opened a door into the unconscious for Graves and led him to reject the essential components of the Western idea of reality—reason and predictability. In particular, Kersnowski traces the emergence in Graves's early poems of a figure he later called "The White Goddess," a being at once terrifying and glorious, who sustains life and inspires poetry. Drawing on interviews with Graves's family, as well as unpublished correspondence and drafts of poems, Kersnowski argues that Graves actually experienced the White Goddess as a real being and that his life as a poet was driven by the purpose of celebrating and explaining this deity and her matriarchy.

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