Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival - by Dennis Wilson Wise (Hardcover)

About the Book

In Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, editor Dennis Wilson Wise argues that speculative poets over the last century have initiated a long unrecognized revival of medieval alliterative poetics. This anthology collects for the first time those poets-C. S. Le...

Book Synopsis

In Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, editor Dennis Wilson Wise argues that speculative poets over the last century have initiated a long unrecognized revival of medieval alliterative poetics. This anthology collects for the first time those poets--C. S. Lewis, Poul Anderson, and others--who have fomented this revival.

Review Quotes

... a massive academic anthology ... six assorted academic pieces (one of themwritten in verse), and 152 poems.... The book is dedicated to the concept that there has been a major literary movement that no one noticed. After establishing the academic argument that there was an alliterative revival in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the editor, Dennis Wilson Wise, a professor at the University of Arizona whose PhD was on Tolkien, recounts his journey of discovery of the modern revival ... expounded on at length. Alliterative verse is not for everyone ... some readers will find this rich and engaging. Others may find it wearying. To find out which reader you are, you may want to ask your library to buy a copy.

Perhaps it would be presumptuous to call it the next avant garde, and obtuse to consider it at all analogous to such mini-crazes as ghazals and villanelles, yet one thing is clear: even the least of these is far more enjoyable to read out loud than the typical product of "magazine verse"--and this return to poetry's essentially aural nature can only be beneficial to all of us.

Since Ða Engliscan Gesithas run the Cædmon Prize for poetry in the Englisc style, the appearance of the first anthology of modern English alliterative verse is obviously of great interest. It may be an even bigger deal than the title alone would suggest. It contains one hundred and fifty poems by fifty-five poets, which easily qualifies it as containing more original alliterative verse by more poets than anything since before Gutenberg invented the printing press. At four hundred and five pages, it dwarfs medieval manuscript collections like the Exeter book, which means it may qualify as the largest published anthology of English alliterative verse, bar none. It provides an in depth view of how alliterative verse has experienced a series of mini revivals in unexpected and obscure places - in the pages of fanzines, embedded in the text of science fiction and fantasy novels, in public performances at events of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and among neopagans intent on worshipping Odin, Thor, and the rest of the Germanic pantheon. [If] you get a copy of Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, you are in for a treat: a chance to read more alliterative verse than you have probably encountered in your lifetime.

Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology deepens and nuances my understanding of what speculative poetry is and how it relates both to speculative fiction and to wider poetic traditions in English. In the course of this book, Dennis Wilson Wise demonstrates convincingly how the structural alliteration that was central to Old English poetry (and that of other old Germanic languages) remains vital today, drawing a line from Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Poul Anderson to Patrick Rothfuss, Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, and Jo Walton.

The phrase "alliterative poetry" immediately connotes archaism, and a literary tradition almost moribund since the mid-fifteenth century. University of Arizona academic Dennis Wilson Wise suggests that the form has been revived almost unnoticed over the last hundred years, and subtly shapes some modern literature, despite the indifference or even opposition of arbiters of taste... Wise's dogged truffle-hunting across this redolent if sometimes rubbish-strewn terrain has uncovered some real prizes, at least some of which are almost certain to be new to even the most widely read. Hopefully, this welcome academic interest can help bring a degree of coherence to this sadly scattered field, and dedicated new adherents to this ancient art.

About the Author

Dennis Wilson Wise is professor of practice and director of undergraduate studies for the English Department at the University of Arizona.