The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others
(Hardback)
Available Formats
Publishing Details
The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others
By (Author) Bonnie Costello
Princeton University Press
Princeton University Press
2nd January 2018
United States
Classifications
Tertiary Education
Non Fiction
Literature: history and criticism
Politics and government
Literary studies: general
811.52
Physical Properties
Hardback
272
Width 152mm, Height 235mm
595g
Description
The Plural of Us is the first book to focus on the poet's use of the first-person plural voice--poetry's "we." Closely exploring the work of W. H. Auden, Bonnie Costello uncovers the trove of thought and feeling carried in this small word. While lyric has long been associated with inwardness and a voice saying "I," "we" has hardly been noticed, eve
Reviews
"Winner of the 2017 Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism, Robert Penn Warren Center and Western Kentucky University"
"As Bonnie Costello shows in her deft, knowledgable and consistently interesting study, Auden was drawn all his writing life to meditate just such questions, and to write poems with, as she puts it, a clear civil motive.'"---Seamus Perry, London Review of Books
"Although Bonnie Costellos critical monographs have been few and far between, they always prove to be of lasting stature, invariably securing a firm position within English-language literary criticism."---Grzegorz Czemiel, Explorations: A Journal of Language and Literature
"I am confident that Costellos statement of pronouns referential ambiguity and elasticity accompanied with her relentless effort to delimit the boundaries of their references is of a great informative value, but it also provides moral support. It is so because the book will keep every critics head upright in all those moments when they feel they are drowning in uncertainty, confusion and despair about the poets us and them."---Ladislav Vit, Svet Literatury
Author Bio
Bonnie Costello is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and professor of English at Boston University. Her many books include Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry, and Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World. She is general editor of The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, and coeditor of Auden at Work.
