Strange Likeness

Strange Likeness provides the first full account of how Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) was rediscovered by twentieth-century poets, and the uses to which they put that discovery in their own writing. Chapters deal with Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Edwin Morgan, and Seamus Heaney. Stylistic debts to Old English are examined, along with the effects on these poets' work of specific ideas about Old English language and literature as taught while these poets were studying the subject at university. Issues such as linguistic primitivism, the supposed 'purity' of the English language, the politics and ethics of translation, and the construction of 'Englishness' within the literary canon are discussed in the light of these poets and their Old English encounters. Heaney's translation of Beowulf is fully contextualized within the body of the rest of his work for the first time.
"[A] groundbreaking and stimulating book...This book is surely required reading for anyone interested in the twentieth-century poetic tradition and its roots as well as any medievalist curious about what happened to Old English literature after the medieval period." --Modern Philology

Introduction: Whose Poetry is Old English Anyway?; 1. 'Ear for the sea-surge': Pound's Uses of Old English; 2. Anglo-Saxon Anxieties: Auden and 'the Barbaric Poetry of the North'; 3. Edwin Morgan: Dredging theWhale-Roads; 4. Old English Escape Routes: Seamus Heaney - the Caedmon of the North; Conclusion: Old English - A Shadow Poetry?; Appendix on Old English Metre