Lives of the Poets

Using Samuel Johnson's 18th-century Lives of the Poets as a blueprint, this exhaustive survey treks through 600 years of mostly British poetry in English, from Wycliffe and Wyatt to Andrew Motion and Les Murray. In each of 64 chapters crammed with juicy anecdotes, Schmidt moves from biography to formal techniques to cultural reception. He focuses, for example, on what Donald Davie liked about Robert Burns, or Pound admired in Chaucer; on how "a living poem can engage another poem at five hundred years' distance, or across the other side of the world." While some would argue that a couple of pages summarizing The Canterbury Tales or The Prelude is insufficient, the book is more of a gathering of friends and rivals than a comprehensive show more companion. Schmidt, the founder of London's influential Carcanet Press, has an intuitive sense of organization and the sequence from Wallace Stevens to Marianne Moore to Elizabeth Bishop is smoothly connected and riveting. Throughout his tour, he lingers at major moments in political, religious and social history to show how poets have used the resources of language to respond to their respective pressures. Recently rediscovered women poets such as Emilia Lanyer, Charlotte Smith and Mina Loy receive ample attention, and 20th-century trends and movements (imagism, vorticism, confessionalism, language poetry, etc.) are forcefully elucidated. show less

A stunning reference on poets and poetry. The author, Michael Schmidt, studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford. He is Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University and Writer in Residence at St John's College, Cambridge. He is a founder (1969) and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press Limited, and a founder (1972) and general editor of PN Review. He has written poetry, fiction and literary history, and is a translator and anthologist. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he received an O.B.E. in 2006 for services to poetry. His literary career has been described as having "a strong sense of internationalism and cultural ‘connectedness’".
This anthology is filled with mini-biographies and the cultural history show more of poetry and literature. Single-volume histories of poetry in English are rare over the centuries. The last popular one was written in 1777, by a Dr Johnson, whose book covered only the preceding century. Paradoxically, their rarity may stem in part from the very diversity of the poetic tradition. For Michael Schmidt, the poet and publisher who has dared to undertake this gargantuan task, has included some 250 poets in his volume and yet still there are some notable omissions; in particular the Anglo-Saxon masterpiece, Beowulf. But one cannot fault him for his bravery. It is a delightful book to dip into from time to time and also a place to discover or rediscover great poets. show less

Wonderful overview. I read the whole thing, but it is probably best read by dipping in here and there.