This Dialogue of One: Essays on Poets from John Donne to Joan Murray
- Submitting institution
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University College London
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 15944
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Eyewear Press
- ISBN
- 978-1-908998-27-9
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- December
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This volume collects 13 essays on English, American and French poets. None of these essays was submitted to REF 2014. 12 were pre-published in slightly different forms and with different titles in a range of journals (the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, Poetry (Chicago), New Walk), while one appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry. They constitute a connected enquiry into the chosen poets’ idioms, anxieties, social contexts and reception histories. While part of the dissemination of this material occurred when these pieces were initially published, the book as a whole has proved popular with non-specialist readers of poetry and influential on the research base. The significance of its insights can be gauged by the fact that it was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s 2015 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. The publicity arising from this greatly boosted dissemination of these insights in both the US and UK.
The book contains much ground-breaking research: of particular significance is an essay on the little-known poet Joan Murray, whose trunk of drafts and personal papers had been lost by librarians at Smith College in 1968: as a result of Ford’s essay and of his email inquiry to current Smith archivists, a new search was instigated, the missing trunk was eventually found, and a vastly expanded new edition of Murray’s oeuvre was published, and widely reviewed, in 2018.
Ford develops original and rigorous analyses of all the poets featured here, advancing significant arguments about the value and meaning of their work, both to their contemporaries and to the 21st-century reader. These essays also reflect and refract Ford’s three decades of experience as a practising poet. Of especial importance is his championing of neglected figures such as Samuel Greenberg, A.S.J. Tessimond, James Thomson and Joan Murray.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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