Poetry for historians: Or, W. H. Auden and history

by Carolyn Steedman

This is a book about the conflict between history and poetry and historians and poets - in Atlantic World society from the end of the seventeenth-century to the present day. Blending historiography and theory, it proceeds by what is the point of poetry as far as historians are concerned? The focus is on W. H. Auden's Cold War-era history poems, but the book also looks at other poets from the seventeenth century onwards, providing original accounts of their poetic and historical educations. An important resource for those teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses in historiography and history and theory, Poetry for historians will also be of relevance to courses on literature in society and the history of education. General readers will relate it to Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman (1987) and Dust (2001), on account of its biographical and autobiographical insights into the way history operates in modern society.

304 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 1, 2018

About the author

Carolyn Kay Steedman, FBA (born 20 March 1947) is a British historian, specialising in the social and cultural history of modern Britain and exploring labour, gender, class, language and childhood. Since 2013, she has been Emeritus Professor of History at University of Warwick, where she had previously been a Professor of History since 1999.

Steedman graduated from the University of Sussex with an undergraduate degree in English and American Studies in 1968, and then completed a master's degree at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1974. She was a teacher from then until 1982, when she joined the Institute of Education in the University of London as a researcher; for the 1983–84 year, she was a Fellow there, before lecturing at the University of Warwick, where she was appointed Senior Lecturer in 1988, Reader in 1991 and Professor of Social History in 1995. For the year 1998–99, she was Director of Warwick's Centre for Study of Social History. Steedman returned to Newnham College to complete her doctorate, which was awarded in 1989.

In 2011, Steedman was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

Reviews

[atito · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow, this is a total knockout. i will read more from steedman. beyond her incredible grasp of the way poetry's formal features circulate beyond their textual confines, the book has on full display her ability to take fine details of any text to generate entire histories: of 18th century domestic labor; of education, greek, latin, or other; of clio the muse's infinite lives; of the everyday, the surplus of historical writing. and then from that she can create an entire poetics of social history, which is to write into existence an event that has not existed in the way we have come to receive it--of a muteness that has generated the infinite freedom of writing. you will (not) find history where you had assumed it would be, a paradoxical relation out of which can only arise the future perfect: "it will have been this" but not to those whose voices we have assumed. AND her prose is lovely? i am a fan

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25/5