'Enchanting' Stephen Fry
'Unconventional, surprising and provocative from the first page' Times Literary Supplement
Did you know:
- Lord Byron sold more books in a day than Jane Austen did in her lifetime
- During the First World War there were more women poets published than soldier poets
- A kitchen-maid became one of the most popular poets of the 18th century
Some people worry that they don't appreciate poetry; but English poetry wasn't written to be appreciated, it was written to be enjoyed. For six centuries people have been reading poetry for enjoyment - for fun, romance, religion and entertainment - and this is a book about those people.
Rhyme & Reason takes you from a medieval accountant (called Chaucer) trying to entertain his lord, past a doomed love affair in the Tower of London, through adoring sonnets and notebooks filled with dirty poems, and into the heart of Byromania and the Victorian hearth, to help you understand why poetry has had such an enduring hold on the British psyche.
From the poems of housemaids to the rhymes of kings, it's the history of Britain through the poems that people read, recited and loved.
Publisher: Atlantic Books
ISBN: 9781805465300
Number of pages: 368
Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm
Language: English
An enchanting and highly readable achievement that reminds us that poetry was always for everyone, not just for academics, intellectuals and bohemians. Wonderfully done. - Stephen Fry
At last! The poetry book that tells us why it's the greatest, most magical form of human expression Makes poetry sexy. At last I love poetry, and I love this book - Jeremy Vine
Here is history that rhymes and scans and where each stanza has an unexpected twist and each image is more multilayered than it first appears; this is a glorious poetry/real life interface! - Ian McMillan
Unconventional, surprising and provocative from the first page... I often found it very funny. - Times Literary Supplement
Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Metamorphoses
The Boundless Deep
A History of England in 25 Poems
Leaves of Grass
This Is Shakespeare
Collected Poems
William Blake and The Sea Monsters of Love
The Ode Less Travelled
Rhyme and Reason
A Little History of Poetry
How to Lay an Egg with a Horse Inside
The Odyssey
A Child's Christmas In Wales 70th Anniversary Edition
This book had me laughing from the first line. It is a history, not of poets, or even of poetry, but rather of the world in which poetry existed and the people who read it. This is such an interesting approach.... More
This is a tremendously funny and painlessly informative history of English poetry. Working through 600 years from early bards to T S Eliot Mark Forsyth packs an awful lot in to his romp through changes to way poetry... More
Please sign in to write a review
Would you like to proceed to the App store to download the Waterstones App?
