English literary biographer Glendinning (Rebecca West, 1987, etc.) claims here that she has ``never been so happy researching and writing any book''—a pleasure she conveys to the reader in this first life of Trollope by a woman, and first popular biography of the recent, primarily scholarly, Trollope revival (e.g., N. John Hall's Trollope, 1991—not reviewed). The chasm between Trollope's life and art—between the bluff, vulgar, tactless civil servant and the elegant novels depicting aristocratic life and manners—is the major problem for Trollope biographers. Hall claimed that the social persona was as much an invention as the literary one, leaving the real Trollope yet to be discovered. Glendinning approaches the problem by emphasizing ``family dynamics,'' with Trollope cultivating an array of voices to cope with the demands of his domestic life, including a dominating and unnurturing mother (a prolific writer herself from whom Trollope acquired his herculean habits of composition); a hapless father; sickly sisters, sons, and nieces; a brother for whom Glendinning confesses her hostility; Trollope's nearly invisible wife, Rose, who privately had an enormous influence on him; and the many modern assertive women whom Trollope met but didn't know how to deal with. Glendinning concludes that Trollope is both the man and his art: a chameleon capable of many moods and voices, his novels reflecting and influencing the political and sexual lives of his contemporaries—politicians, writers, country gentry—with whom he associated. The author is particularly strong on the trivia that comprised the style of Trollope's life: clothes, digestion, holidays, dancing, flirting, gardens, illness, male friendship—all of which are copiously illustrated from Trollope's own prose. For those who read Trollope for pleasure or from curiosity, in comfortable chairs without taking notes. (Fifty photographs.)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-394-58268-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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