Lives of the Poets

by Michael Schmidt, Simon Shaw

Book by Schmidt, Michael

Genres: Poetry, Biography, Nonfiction, Literature, Literary Criticism, History, Reference

1108 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1998

About the author

Michael Schmidt is a literary historian, poet, novelist, translator, and anthologist as well as an editor and publisher. His books include The Novel: A Biography and The First Poets. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he received an OBE in 2006 for services to poetry and higher education. He lives in Manchester, England.

Reviews

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

The drawback to this book is a drawbook inherent in most similar projects. If the literary history is too long, it gets boring and feels list like. Parts of this book do read like a list, and other parts feel like Schmidt is trying to show off how he himself writes.

The book, however, is also good despite its flaws. Schmidt writes wonderfully when dealing with the Romantics, Transendentalists, and early Victorians. Those chapters are the best in the book, and Schmidt's love for poetry really comes out in that section. The introduction is also wonderfully written, and Schmidt does include a chapter to explain why he includes some authors and not others (I disagree with the absence of Wilde and near absence of Sexton). He also writes, for the most part, in a manner that appeals both to the student of literature and a lover of poet. The book is a good guide and a good starting source for a study of English poetry.

[Pewterbreath · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read this thing from cover to cover and it's EXACTLY the sort of guide to poetry that I like. It includes everything from biography, importance, literary stuff, to little gossipy bits that add a lot of flavor. Certainly the most comprehensive guide of its kind--it kinda falls apart as it gets towards contemporary poetry, but who can blame him for that? After all, the hallmarks of a given era are never really decided until at least a half century later. Well worth the while.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am rereading this book and I must say it is consistently amazing with detail and coverage and analysis of so many poets.

The book is an excellent resource for discovering poets you have not read, to better understanding the ones you have. I would put Michael Schmidt on par with Harold Bloom for sheer breadth of reading. The analyses look at the life and the work and where they tend to interact together.

There are a lot of poets to cover. For particular poets and the analysis that Schmidt gives, I'd recommend the following as a way in to the book. If you like these below to learn more about, you'll probably like the rest.

Christopher Marlowe
Lord Byron
Thomas Hardy

[S.L. Myers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the first two thirds. I actually said I didn't want this book to ever end, I was enjoying learning about the poets and their poetry so much. But come the 20th century, and the charm of the book died. He spent more time on the last century of poetry than on any other time period. Poets exponentially increased with each decade until the last few chapters were so dense I couldn't keep track of who he was writing about. He should have written two books. But I'll still read his book on Greek poets. He's best when dealing with deep and narrow.

[Dr G · Rating 5 out of 5]

One cannot but feel admiration for Michael Schmidt’s achievement in producing this book. In the last few pages he states, “It is an act of folly, I now know, to undertake so large a task as this. What fuelled it from the outset was a fierce and sometimes partisan enthusiasm for specific poems. I like the way that poems connect with one another and weave a larger pattern. A living poem can energise another poem at 500 years’ distance, or across the other side of the world. For the most part I follow chronology in this history, knowing how unfashionable in academic circles it now is to plot such a course. But it is only against a sense of chronology, of developing styles, of what was once genuinely new can be understood, its abiding value inferred.”
This is very interesting: (1) I think it was a folly ; I found the book fascinating in its comments on pre-twentieth century poets, stimulating and challenging; but I felt it became something slightly different as it reviewed the more recent poets, and while there were certainly stimulating and challenging elements there too, there were also aspects which were more contentious. I think this has to do with his inevitably different relationships with poets who lived long ago and those whose lives are nearly or exactly contemporary. (2) His “fierce and sometimes partisan enthusiasm for specific poems” certainly became apparent and we might add that it also seemed randomly esoteric at times. I don’t object to that but it might have been declared earlier in the work rather than being confessed after 900-odd pages. Certainly his choice of twentieth century poets could be the source of much discussion. (3) His focus on “the way that poems connect with one another and weave a larger pattern” is effectively the theme of the book and is often fascinatingly argued and illustrated. One wonders whether it might have been a better idea to write a book that pursued that idea, rather than a book which presented itself as an encyclopaedia of English-language poets. (4) I do get tired of the curious phenomenon of polemicists or analysts who claim they are fighting against the tide (here, in relation to his organising the work chronologically).
To return to my original enthusiasm for this book, it is extraordinary how Schmidt retains such a comprehensive knowledge of so many poems and poets, and their relationship to contemporary events. You almost need to have complete collections of all these poets by your side as you read, at least if you read it right through, rather than using it occasionally as a reference resource from which to check on biographical facts or criticism of individual poets.
Schmidt begins his consideration of each poet with a valuable précis of the person’s life and then moves into his analysis of the poems and his analysis of how the work connects with earlier poets.
He cutely explains: “The poet may not know precisely a line’s or a stanza’s parents; indeed, may not be interested in finding out. Yet as readers of poetry we can come to know more about a poem than the poet does and know more fully. To know more does not imply that we read Freud into an innocent cucumber, or Marx into a poem about daffodils, but that we read with our ears and hear Chaucer transmuted through Spenser, Sydney through Herbert, Milton through Wordsworth, Skelton through Graves, Housman through Larkin, Sappho through H. D. or Adrienne Rich.” “There is no theft in poetry except straight-forward plagiarism. Every poet has a hand in another poet’s pocket, lifting out small change and sometimes a folded bill. It’s borrowing, borrowing that is paid back by a poem.”
It is sometimes tricky working out just which Michael Schmidt we are reading; he is a published poet (which can mean his comments on contemporary or even recent poets must be read as coming from a participant rather than a disinterested bystander); he is also the editor of both a poetry journal and a poetry publishing house, both of which he founded (and which prompts him to voice, fraternally, an editor’s prejudices from time to time); he grew up in Mexico but has degrees and teaching experience in the USA and Britain (which I think gives him an Americentric bias in the poets from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries he chooses to include) and he is an academic (despite his periodic dismissal of academic critics).
Several times, Schmidt goes out of his way to detail his personal interaction with figures who are part of his story. This comes uncomfortably close to a sort of name-dropping.
His writing style is engaging although I dislike his habit of (usually) writing the possessive form of names which end with an s without an additional s after the apostrophe (a weird syntactical style which ignores the way we pronounce the genitive name; and it is weirder when we find that occasionally he writes a name with the additional s: “Thomas’ ”/ “Thomas’s”; “Graves’ ”/ Graves’s”; “Burns’”/ “Burns’s”!).
I could become irritated with his creation of neologisms (Presumingly; Unparaphrasable; Pranksterishness; Emblamatizing; Symbolification; Tentativenesses, to select but a few) but I generally enjoyed reading him so am – nearly – comfortable indulging this. From time to time he writes something which is delicious: “For mediaeval listeners, allegory was a way of seeing. They didn’t have to unpack a poem like customs officers. They marvelled at how it delivered multiple meanings. They felt it.”
There are times, however, when he would have been well advised to have a cup of tea and then lie down for a while: “In the new dawn the great eagle of English poetry is fit, sleek and well fed, but its wings have been clipped – tastefully and painlessly, of course, but the bird finds flight difficult. It will never again convey in its talons a plump and struggling poet like Geoffrey Chaucer to the House of Fame. Next time a poet really flies in the flesh, it will not be on ‘viewless wings of poesy’ but in a machine.” That is a metaphor unwisely pursued beyond the limits of felicity! There are also times when a reliable editor would have helped: “Depopulation, enclosure, grinding poverty, corruption among the gentry and by the gentry of the poor, mental illness, breakdown in community, the triumph of Methodism (which ate into his own congregation)”. If we break this down, we are left with “corruption…by the gentry of the poor”, which simply does not make sense.
The book presents a great deal of interesting information, and a great deal of interesting interpretation. I think it is important, though, to take it all as one man’s point of view, (albeit a highly intelligent, extraordinarily well-read man with a remarkable ability to systematize his vast array of information) rather than a definitive truth about individual poets or poetic movements. However, with that caveat, his comments are never boring and never ridiculous. He also has a knack of finding arcane details. He writes of the Scot, Robert Henryson, who died of diarrhoea. “When the physician despaired of his cure, an old witch came to the bedside and asked Henryson, if he would be made better. She indicated a ‘whikey tree’ in his orchard and instructed him to walk about it three times, repeating the words: ‘whikey tree whikey tree take away this flux from me’. Henryson, too weak to go so far, pointed to an oak table in his room and asked, ‘gude dame I pray ye tell me, if it would not be as well if I repeated thrice theis words oken burd, oken burd, garre me shit a hard turd.’ The hag departed in a rage and in ‘half a quarter of an hour’ Henryson was dead.”
I do not remember seeing that in Leavis!
In looking at Schmidt’s biographical information of the early poets, I found it fascinating that the fathers of so many of them died when the poet was still very young (Thomas Campion, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Robt Herrick, George Herbert, Richard Lovelace, John Wilmot – Earl of Rochester , Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Christopher Smart, Thomas Chatterton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stephen Crane). I wonder what could be made of that!
I found it a little disconcerting that Schmidt’s segues from one poet to another often render it unclear during the transition just which of the two he is writing about.
The book is, once the early British poets have been covered, decidedly Americentric. The later non-British poets are almost all American. For example, he considers just half a dozen Australian poets, and he seems to covertly explain this small number with an oblique suggestion that Australian poets have been incomprehensibly provincial. (This begs the question of whether the Americans are themselves provincial, but in a hegemonic provincialism!) Other English-speaking nationalities are similarly overlooked. However, in the grand scheme, these are quibbles.
More positively, a sample of Schmidt’s erudition, wit, ingenuity and provocative thoughts might be taken from the following:
*“Readers can choose among his several phases, but it is hard for the lover of the young Wordsworth to love the old.”
Of Herman Melville: “‘ Some critics,’ says the poet Robert Penn Warren, ‘would place his name among the most important American poets of the nineteenth century, or even today.’ Some wouldn’t.”
“For a long time it was considered a bit de trop for people with literary taste to love, or even to like, Housman’s verse. It belonged to self-pitying adolescence and after that to the mass of readers who don’t like real poetry… Today it is again possible to confess a liking for his work, though it still hardly figures on the academic syllabus.… The poems are taken to heart and learned by heart, despite the now mercilessly documented character of the harsh, opinionated professor, the sometimes vindictive classical scholar, the tensely repressed homosexual…It would be foolish to pretend that he is a major poet: he has too limited a repertoire, his achievements are in one genre. But he is undeniably a great poet, since he did what he did with genius, finding impersonal idioms to express his deepest hurt.”
On Kipling: “The exultation to ‘Take up the White Man’s burden –/Send for the best you breed’ comes in a poem which tends to prophetic satire, not jingoism.” And “His critics deduce his politics selectively, finding in him a crude consistency of thought which the major works themselves contradict.”
“Greek and Latin were central to Eliot’s studies at Harvard, and he attended a course on Dante, about whom he later wrote a suggestive, influential and largely wrong-headed essay
Edward Estlin Cummings (e.e.cummings) “was born with capital letters in 1894”
“It is impossible not to love ‘Fern Hill’, but hard not to distrust the saccharine sadness that it generates.”
For me, those are reflective of why, despite its enormous length and various other features which one might query, this is a superb book, well worth the time it takes to read.

[Steven Belanger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly outstanding--in breadth and in depth--work of the history of over 300 poets and, therefore, by extension, of poetry itself.

Schmidt gives every person his or her due, and he doesn't give too much more to the Frosts, the Shakespeare's and the other giants. He gave just as much space to a poet he felt was unfairly neglected as he did to, say, Chaucer.

His enthusiasm for the poetry overshadows his enthusiasm for the poet, as it should, as this is more a biography of poetry than it is of poets. In fact, he tends to dislike it when critics care more for the poet than the poetry, and he clearly stays far away from doing so himself. When biography is necessary--for the suicides, for the institutionalized--he mentions it briefly and shows how it found its way into the poetry. It all comes back to the words.

This book made me want to write poems better. (So far, just one purchased.) I don't know if I can do so--I'm a much better prose stylist than a poet, but by God I will try. Maybe Schmidt can write about me some day. Of such things are quiet dreams made.

You don't have to love poems to read this, but I'm going to guess that someone who doesn't even like them should stay away. But if you're even marginally interested in the poems everyone has learned--the Frost, the Shakespeare, the Milton, the Beats and the Victorians--then you might want to give this a shot. It may even be interesting for those who like a certain era's poetry, or even a specific poet.

I read many other books while reading this one, as it's almost 1,000 pages, and there's only so much of this kind of thing I can take. But Schmidt makes it all readable. He doesn't get esoteric or snobby too often, though he obviously knows he knows what he's talking about, if you know what I mean. But at a party, you'd listen to his conversation about this stuff, and not walk away from him because of it. He doesn't talk down to the reader, as much as he talks with the reader. Occasionally he goes off on critic-ease, but you can safely skip those passages and not miss much.

If for nothing else, this is worth reading so you can Google the poet and his or her poems, and give them a shot. Schmidt is so enthusiastic for poetry in general, he would be completely in favor of the reader doing this. As a publisher, he would rather us buy the poet's books, of course, but let's not get carried away here...

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schmidt took on an impossible task and accomplished a minor miracle with this book. Brief, well written and cogent biographical and cultural entries on every poet who wrote in English that you have ever heard of and many that you haven't (unless you are as widely read as Schmidt). He is opinionated with vast learning to back it up, erudite but generally not pedantic.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

A huge book, finally finished. This tells the story of English poetry from the beginning to the present, through biographies, chapter by chapter. A fantastic, incisive introduction to the history of poetry written in English (from around the world, not just in the UK).

[Susan Jean Cronin]

I've been reading bits and pieces of this book for years, mostly for research. Now I'm finally going to read it start to finish.

[William Schram · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lives of the Poets is a massive tome over nine hundred pages long. Author Michael Schmidt explores the lives of English Poets in the book. The book doesn't start with Geoffrey Chaucer but with someone more obscure named Richard Rolle of Hampole. By examining the poets' lives and times, the author delves into the development of the English language.

All of the included poets wrote in the English language. The book begins in the fourteenth century, around seven hundred years ago. Although Schmidt doesn't start with Chaucer, he covers him in due time. William Langland is one example of a poet I hadn't heard of before. English is my mother tongue, but I haven't studied its origins. Therefore, I don't feel bad about my lack of knowledge. William Langland wrote a poem called Piers Plowman. It's about an everyman character who tries to become a better person through faith.

The book isn't a comprehensive guide to the poet's lives, but it does offer a window through one or two of their works. Listing every poet covered in the book would be an exhausting task, one I am not prepared to undertake while on vacation. If you've heard of them and they wrote poetry in English, they are in this book. William Shakespeare, Robert Browning, Christopher Marlowe, John Gower, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, John Milton, Anne Bradstreet, Richard Lovelace, and the list goes on.

I enjoyed the book. Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.

[crw eley · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the last year this book has dominated me, by means of its magisterial intensity.

For half of my 68 years of age, I have loved poetry. Yet, as a teacher of it, I was required to focus on nineteenth and twentieth century verse. Not so with Michael Schmidt.

This monumental tome, of some 1000 pages, covers a plethora of poets and styles going back to Chaucer. Major and sometimes, relatively unknown poets, along with every poet I know of, are assessed, analysed and displayed, in all their glory, in generous measure.

[Bud · Rating 3 out of 5]

This 1,000+ page book was an interesting mixture: part biographical sketches, part history, part poetry samples, and a generous dollop of analysis and literary criticism. One major contribution is connecting the dots between individual poets and their historical predecessors - the connections are there to see in writing styles and themes. I must admit I did not read all 1,000 pages but picked out some of my favorite individuals and read about them. This must have taken a lifetime of work to accomplish.

[Natalie Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am still working on this rich, dense, beautiful staggering work. Schmidt also wrote a similar book about the novel which I admired. Indeed, Schmidt is currently doing a great service to the arts by demonstrating how we can best appreciate and profit from great poetry and prose.

If you want to appreciate literature better, there are no safer hands than those of Michael Schmidt, purveyer of wealth, who provides erudition with a lot of amusing and amazing side dishes.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is amazing. Review pending.

[Suzanne Hess · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this was like sitting in a poetry synopsis class. Schmidt's bias was throughout, making judgements better left to the reader.

[Daniel Klawitter · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Every poet has a hand in another poet's pocket."

[Tad Richards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two books together -- this one and Lives of the Modern Poets by William H. Pritchard. Enjoying Pritchard, loved Schmidt.

Schmidt -- a brief but satisfying critical bio of every significant English language poet, showing an understanding of all of them. I found myself especially loving his accounts of the very early poets that I'd never heard of, like Rolle and Henryson. How can one not love this story of Henryson's death?

being very old he dyed of a diarrhea or fluxe, of whome there goes this merry, though somewhat unsauory tale, that all phisitians hauing giuen him ouer & he lying drawing his last breath there came an old woman vnto him, who was held a witch & asked him whether he would be cured, to whome he sayed very willingly. then quod she there is a whikey tree in the lower end of your orchard, & if you will goe and walke but thrice about it, & thrice repeate theis wordes whikey tree whikey tree take away this fluxe from me you shall be presently cured, he told her that beside he was extreme faint & weake it was extreme frost & snow & that it was impossible for him to go: She told him that vnles he did so it was impossible he should recouer. Mr Henderson then lifting upp himselfe, & pointing to an Oken table that was in the roome, asked her & seied gude dame I pray ye tell me, if it would not do as well if I repeated thrice theis words oken burd oken burd garre me shit a hard turde. the woman seing herselfe derided & scorned ran out of the house in a great passion & Mr Henderson within halfe a quarter of an houre departed this life.

Pritchard gives critical essays on the most important modern poets, plus Hardy, who's pre-modern, but these days getting the recognition he so richly deserves. He's very good on E. A. Robinson. Snarky on Yeats, which is unusual. I'm about halfway through the book, just getting to Pound.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A stunning reference on poets and poetry. The author, Michael Schmidt, studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford. He is Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University and Writer in Residence at St John's College, Cambridge. He is a founder (1969) and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press Limited, and a founder (1972) and general editor of PN Review. He has written poetry, fiction and literary history, and is a translator and anthologist. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he received an O.B.E. in 2006 for services to poetry. His literary career has been described as having "a strong sense of internationalism and cultural ‘connectedness’".
This anthology is filled with mini-biographies and the cultural history of poetry and literature. Single-volume histories of poetry in English are rare over the centuries. The last popular one was written in 1777, by a Dr Johnson, whose book covered only the preceding century. Paradoxically, their rarity may stem in part from the very diversity of the poetic tradition. For Michael Schmidt, the poet and publisher who has dared to undertake this gargantuan task, has included some 250 poets in his volume and yet still there are some notable omissions; in particular the Anglo-Saxon masterpiece, Beowulf. But one cannot fault him for his bravery. It is a delightful book to dip into from time to time and also a place to discover or rediscover great poets.

[Jim Leckband · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are many advantages to read a general reference book/history/biography done by a single author - consistency, lively viewpoints and little redundancy. Of course you have to like and trust the author if you have any hope of finishing the book. Luckily I knew little about poetry to question or fault Schmidt's takes on poets and I really liked his style.

As the title succinctly states - he is tackling the lives of the poets as well as the poetry. This makes it more interesting as you learn about the life and times that gave birth the poems. Also Schmidt is very interested in the give-and-take between poets as if poetry is mostly a conversation between fellow poets and us readers just happen to read the transcripts!

P.S. Try to read this book in chapters at a time - with breaks in between. I usually read a totally unrelated book in between chapters. Over 900 pages of this is too much to tackle as a single book.

[H]

Epic. Formative. The college education in poetry I didn't get condensed into 940 pages. Pieces schools and strands together in a breathless proximity that opens my options as a writer. And teaches me to fixate less on like/dislike and more on frontiers, permissions; on the poem and not the nebulous Poetry.

Eavan Boland: "Truly important poets change two things and never one without the other: the interior of the poem and external perceptions of the identity of the poet."

[Ricky · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great collection on the lives of the poets, it’s an engrossing and interesting read. Michael Schmidt pulls the poets lives together in an entertaining way and helps you to understand some of their motives and creativity drives. If you love poetry it’s a must read – you wont be disappointed.

[John Pendrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must thank Michael Schmidt for his appreciation of poetry and poets. I first read him because I found he was a friend of a favourite poet of mine, Elizabeth Jennings. He was so kind to reply to a question I asked about her.

It is only recently I got a copy of this two volume work. Opening it anywhere it never fails to delight and inform.

[E · Rating 1 out of 5]

no, i won't finish it, thank you.

[max · Rating 5 out of 5]

The great update to Johnson's classic.