LSLL 14: A Brief Survey of Contemporary English Poetry

A Brief Survey of Contemporary English Poetry

Mohamed Kamel Abdel-Daem
Shaqra University, Saudi Arabia

As a researcher in the domain of English poetry, the author has noticed that most of the books about English poetry, which are available at most libraries where English is not a first language, examine the British poetry from its beginnings in the Anglo-Saxon era to the 1940s or the 1950s, and the American poetry from its beginnings in the seventeenth century till the early 1940s ; fewer research papers and theses and dissertations have been done on recent or present-day English poets. Current English poetry cannot be easily put into clear-cut categories, like modernist or pre-modernist movements.

There are so many groupings and individual creations; the poets' output is affected by several factors: performance, songs, T.V. shows, cinema, and so on. One poet may be related to various trends. Hence, this guidebook is mainly compiled, as a modest attempt, to meet the requirements of non-native students of English poetry ( undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers). It tries to present a sufficient overview of contemporary British poets roughly from the 1960s to the early 2000s, and contemporary American poets roughly from the 1950s to the early 2000s . The author has not intended this survey just to be a historical arrangement of the poets' biographies; rather, he has painstakingly depended upon various resources in order to pinpoint each poet's artistic background, his/her works, themes, influences, and the comments or criticism written on his/her poems (some poets are just listed by name, or put into verse groups; more details may be added in consecutive editions or by other researchers ) . In short, the poets are mentioned aesthetically rather than chronologically so that this may enable the interested reader to observe the characteristics of the British verse groups that have been birthed in the contemporary poetical arena.

ISBN 9783862884469. LINCOM Studies in Language and Literature 14. 122pp. 2013.