A Little History of Poetry

February 17, 2020
In this clever, wide-ranging history, British literary critic Carey (The Essential Paradise Lost) provides a tour of Western poetry, from Homer to Maya Angelou. Each brief chapter tackles one or more poets representative of a particular era, with excerpts from their works, brief accounts of their lives, and Carey’s insightful critical commentaries. His writing is instructive yet wry, as in his description of Petrarch’s love poetry as “numbingly tedious” and consisting of “a lot of weeping, but little else.” The reader is given a sense of how poets can be compared and contrasted with one another (Keats and Shelley, for example, as fellow exemplars of Romanticism who were, respectively, profoundly sensual and consumed with abstract ideals). Carey’s is a very traditional look at the Western canon, meaning the poets represented are overwhelmingly white, and perhaps even more overwhelmingly British, though a fair share of women are covered. Also, the book ends on poems written in the 1960s and ’70s, so there is no contemporary ground covered. In any case, it is called a “little history,” so one cannot expect it to be all things to all people. Those looking for a shrewdly condensed and accessible history of poetry could not ask for a better guide.