商品簡介
Andrew Motion was appointed Poet Laureate in 1999, but alongside his work as a poet he has also had a significant career as a prize-winning biographer and an illuminating critic. Ways of Life contains a selection of his articles about painters and poets, as well as a number of striking personal pieces.
The literary essays in Ways of Life look at a wide assortment of writers, concentrating on a history of neglect. There are notable articles on John Clare and Ivor Gurney, on marginal figures such as Leigh Hunt and Joseph Severn, on the less well-known work of generally celebrated writers, including John Donne, Christina Rossetti and Thomas Hardy, and on hitherto overlooked aspects of writers such as John Betjeman.
Elsewhere in the book, Motion includes a piece that daringly imagines what Edward Thomas might have achieved had he not died tragically young at the Battle of Arras in 1917; an account of a trip that Motion made with his father and other veterans to the beaches of Normandy on the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day; and a marvelling account of the sea voyage he took, retracing John Keats's journey to Italy in 1820.
Ways of Life is a richly varied and richly rewarding collection - original, acute and emotionally charged.
作者簡介
Andrew Motion was appointed Poet Laureate in 1999; he is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London.
