C.S. Lewis enjoyed both stories and poetry. His narrative poems combine his gift in story-telling with his skills as a poet. The four pieces in this book are the only narrative poems by Lewis known to be in existence. The poems are full of Lewis's romantic imagination; they display his love and knowlege of classic mythology and his own mastery of the English language. Dymer (1926) - Launcelot (?early 1930s) - The Nameless Isle (1930) - The Queen of Drum (1938) 'Dymer' was begun by Lewis as a story in prose and the original idea had 'come to him' at the age of 17. It tells the story of a man who begets a monster. The monster kills his father and becomes a god. 'Launcelot' is based on the legend of King Arthur and the Holy Grail and 'The Nameless Isle' is the story of a shipwrecked mariner and his adventures on a magic island. 'The Queen of Drum' tells of an old pompous king and his young queen who eventually has to choose between heaven, hell and fairyland.
"Presents an overview of narrative poems, including the form's history, elements, and traits and how poets use narrative poems to express ideas." -- from publisher's website.
Over the past thirty years, narrative poems have made a comeback against the lyric approach to poetry that has dominated the past century. Drawing on a decade of conferences and critical seminars on the topic, The Contemporary Narrative Poem examines this resurgence of narrative and the cultural and literary forces motivating it. Gathering ten essays from poet-critics who write from a wide range of perspectives and address a wide range of works, the collection transcends narrow conceptions of narrative, antinarrative, and metanarrative. The authors ask several questions: What formal strategies do recent narrative poems take? What social, cultural, and epistemological issues are raised in such poems? How do contemporary narrative poems differ from modernist narrative poems? In what ways has history been incorporated into the recent narrative poetry? How have poets used the lyric within narrative poems? How do experimental poets redefine narrative itself through their work? And what role does consciousness play in the contemporary narrative poem? The answers they supply will engage every poet and student of poetry.
The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Stephen Orgel The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With definitive texts and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Chinese Narrative Poetry brings a new perspective to some of China's best-loved and most influential poems, including Ts'ai Yen's "Poem of Affliction," Po Chu-yi's "Song of Everlasting Sorrow," and Wei Chuang's recently discovered "Song of the Lady of Ch'in." Composed in the shih form during the Late Han, Six Dynasties, and T'ang periods, these poems stand out as masterworks of narrative art. Yet paradoxically, their narrative qualities have been little recognized or explored in either traditional Chinese or modern Western scholarship. The reason for this neglect is that Western literary traditions acknowledge their origins in epic poetry and thus take narrative for granted, but the Chinese tradition is fundametally based on lyric and does not admit of a separate category for narrative poetry. Drawing on both classical Chinese critical works and the most recent Western contributions to the theory of narrative, Levy shows how narrative elements developed out of the lyrical conventions of shih. In doing so, she accomplishes a double purpose, guiding the modern reader to an understanding of the nature of narrative in Chinese poetry and shedding light on the ways in which Chinese poets adapted the devises of lyric to the needs of a completely different expressive mode. Students of Chinese literature will welcome this pathbreaking study, but Chinese Narrative Poetry will interest other scholars as well because it addresses questions of crucial importance for literary theory and comparative literature, particularly the central issue of the applicability of Western critical concepts to non-Western literature and culture.
"Dymer" by C. S. Lewis. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
Poetry, by definition, is voice, which here includes the worlds of both sound silence in which the poem exists. Voice in poetry represents the way in which individuals articulate themselves as subjects. English Narrative Poetry: A Babel of Voices explores how poets in different periods of English literature have manipulated voice in their verse narratives. This book, devoted to voice, explores narrative poems ranging from the Renaissance to the contemporary. Starting from Shakespeare, it journeys through Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Rossetti, Browning, H. D., Ted Hughes, Jackie Kay, and Bernardine Evaristo in the light of narrative theory. The multiplicity of voice attests to the fact that narrative poetry can present itself as a ‘representation’ of real life by ‘mimicking’ the voices of women and men, creating what, taken together, comprises a babel of voices.
Narrative poetry is distinguished from other types of verse in that it aims to relate a connected series of events and, therefore, deals primarily with actions, rather than with thoughts or emotions. This definition, however, simple as it appears to be in theory, is often difficult to apply as a test because other matter is blended with the pure narrative. In any story where the situation is made prominent, description may be required to make clear the scene and explain movements to the reader; thus Enoch Arden begins with a word picture of a sea-coast town. Again it is often necessary to analyze the motives which actuate certain characters, and so it becomes necessary to introduce exposition of some sort into the plot. The poems in this collection serve to enforce the lesson that the four standard rhetorical formsÑnarration, description, exposition, and argumentationÑare constantly being combined and welded in a complicated way. In cases where these various literary elements are apparently in a tangle, a classification, if it be made at all, must be based on the design of the poem as a whole, and the emphasis and proportion given to the respective elements by the author. If the stress is laid on the recounting of the events which make up a unified action, and if the other factors are made subordinate and subsidiary to this end, then the poem in question belongs to the narrative group. The antiquity of the narrative as a form of literature is undisputed. Indeed it has been established with a reasonable degree of certainty that poetry in its very beginnings was narrative and in its primitive state must have been a sort of rude, rhythmical chant, originated and participated in by the tribe as a whole, and telling of the exploits of gods or legendary heroes. In the course of time there arose the minstrel, who, acting first as chorus leader, became eventually the representative of the tribe and its own special singer. When we reach a somewhat more advanced stage of civilization, we find regularly appointed bards reciting their lays in the hall of the chieftain or urging on the warriors to battle with rehearsals of past victories. Originally these bards simply repeated the old oral traditions handed down as common property, but the opportunity for the display of individual genius soon induced them to try variations on the current themes and to compose versions of their own. With this advance of individualism, poetry became gradually more complex. Various elements, lyrical, descriptive, and dramatic, assumed some prominence and tended to develop separate forms. This differentiation, however, did not impair the vigor of the story-telling spirit, and a constant succession of narrative poems down to the present day evidences how productive and characteristic a feature of our literature this form has been.
