Beyond the Lyric
British poetry is enjoying a period of exceptional richness and variety. This is exciting but it's also confusing, and throws up the need for an enthusiastic guide that can explain and celebrate the many parallel poetry projects now underway.
Beyond the Lyric does just that. This is a book of enthusiasms: an intelligent and witty map of contemporary British poetry and a radical, accessible guide to living British poets, grouped for the first time according to the kind of poetry they write.
In a series of groundbreaking new classifications, beginning with the bread-and-butter diction of the Plain Dealers and ending on the capacious generosity of the Exploded Lyric, it examines the broad range of contemporary tendencies – from the baroque swagger of the Dandies to the restrained elegance of the Oxford Elegists; from the layered, haunting verse of Mythopoesis to the inventive explorations of the New Formalists. By probing the cultural context from which these groups emerge and shifting the critical focus back to the work itself, Sampson’s astute analysis illuminates and demystifies each of these terms and asks the big questions about what makes a poem.
The result is a celebration of poetry as a connected, responsive and above all communitarian form. Lively, engaging and inviting, this is the indispensible and authoritative guide for anyone who's ever wondered what's going on in British poetry today.
Fiona Sampson MBE FRSL is a leading British poet, writer, and Romanticist. Professor Emerita of Poetry at the University of Roehampton and Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, she has received numerous national and international literary awards, and her work has been published in thirty-eight languages.
Becoming George completes a trilogy of acclaimed biographies. In Search of Mary Shelley was an Observer, Independent, Financial Times, and Times Book of the Year. Two-Way Mirror was a Washington Post Book of the Year, a New York Times bestseller, and a finalist for the Plutarch Prize and the US PEN’s Jacqueline Bograd Weld International Award for Biography.