Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Images of London in medieval English literature
- 2 London and the early modern stage
- 3 London and the early modern book
- 4 London and poetry to 1750
- 5 Staging London in the Restoration and eighteenth century
- 6 London and narration in the long eighteenth century
- 7 London and nineteenth-century poetry
- 8 London in the Victorian novel
- 9 London in Victorian visual culture
- 10 London in poetry since 1900
- 11 London and modern prose, 1900-1950
- 12 Immigration and postwar London literature
- 13 Writing London in the twenty-first century
- 14 Inner London
- Guide to further reading
- Index
10 - London in poetry since 1900
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Images of London in medieval English literature
- 2 London and the early modern stage
- 3 London and the early modern book
- 4 London and poetry to 1750
- 5 Staging London in the Restoration and eighteenth century
- 6 London and narration in the long eighteenth century
- 7 London and nineteenth-century poetry
- 8 London in the Victorian novel
- 9 London in Victorian visual culture
- 10 London in poetry since 1900
- 11 London and modern prose, 1900-1950
- 12 Immigration and postwar London literature
- 13 Writing London in the twenty-first century
- 14 Inner London
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Summary
A novel or a play has to have a setting, but the same is not quite true of a poem. In a poem, the 'setting' may be little more than an implicit extrapolation from content. Where, for instance, is the speaker in Hopkins's anguished sonnet 'No worst, there is none'? We know that he wrote it in Dublin, but it contains no identifiable reference to the city, so it is not in any meaningful sense a 'Dublin' poem. At the opposite extreme are intensely localised poems, like Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey', Coleridge's 'Frost at Midnight', and Arnold's 'Rugby Chapel', which vicariously situate the reader in the precise locale in which the poetic meditation purports to be happening. A poem thus 'localised' is in every sense a 'London' (or wherever) poem. Between these two extremes are poems in which places in London are mentioned explicitly, but in a less sustained or interiorised way. This gives us a 'London' spectrum that runs from the implicit, through the explicit, to the fully 'localised'. The present chapter leaves aside the first category and focuses on the second and third.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London , pp. 180 - 200Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011