The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot

by C.K. Stead

A standard survey of modern English poetry from the new tradition established by Yeats in the 1890s through to Eliot, including a reassessment of the Georgians and the influence of Pound.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Christian Karlson Stead is a New Zealand writer whose works include novels, poetry, short stories, and literary criticism.

One of Karl Stead's novels, Smith's Dream, provided the basis for the film Sleeping Dogs, starring Sam Neill; this became the first New Zealand film released in the United States.

Mansfield: A Novel was a finalist for the 2005 Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize and received commendation in the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the South East Asia and South Pacific region.

C. K. Stead was born in Auckland. For much of his career he was Professor of English at the University of Auckland, retiring in 1986 to write full-time. He received a CBE in 1985 and was admitted into the highest honour New Zealand can bestow, the Order of New Zealand in 2007.

Reviews

[Lorraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know very little about W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot and very little about modernism, so this was very informative for me. I also like the author's writing style; for a book of literary criticism written in the 60s, it's very readable with clearly cited sources.

And then the author loses me in the last two chapters where he explains in-depth Eliot's theory of writing poetry and whether or not he thinks Eliot accomplishes it in specific poems. Some of it is just that I don't like Eliot, and some of it is that his ideas about the poetry writing process are incredibly opaque and bizarre to me.

[David Lai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very readable book analysing Yeats' and Eliot's responses to the poetry world of the first decades of the twentieth century. I still don't really get Yeats, but I think I get Eliot more. Stead gives a pretty damning appraisal of Four Quartets.