Peter Robinson
Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situations.
Oxford University Press, 2005. First printing. 0199273251 vi/287 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6" x 9", is bound in black cloth, with stamped gilt lettering to spine. Minor loss appears at top of front flyleaf. Book is otherwise in fine condition, with firm binding, clean and bright pages. Dust jacket displays very light shelfwear.
"Peter Robinson's third book of literary criticism is a sequence of chapters exploring ways that selves and situations will interact and become imaginatively identified in poems. Readings of works by Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, Louis MacNeice, W. S. Graham, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Curnow, Charles Tomlinson, Mairi MacInnes, Tom Raworth, and Roy Fisher demonstrate how poems can be both attached to, and detached from the culture, society, and conditions in which they were written. These closely detailed studies draw out and underline both the ubiquity and elusiveness of the self in the situation of the text. The poems are also revealed to be focal points for relations between readerly and writerly selves and their situations in and over time".