William H. Pritchard

William H Pritchard

A collection of commentaries on such authors as Shakespeare, William Blake, and Norman Mailer provides insight and humorous responses to the technical and personal aspects of literary works.

Talking Back to Emily Dickinson and Other Essays

William Pritchard's collection of essays and reviews on poets and poetry ranges from Dryden and Milton through the major American and British poets of the last century. Pritchard's sensibility has been trained in the practice of attending to a poet's style and voice—of what Robert Frost once called “ear-reading.” His endeavor is not to discover hidden, buried treasures (what the poem “really means”) but to engage with instances of measured language as they reveal themselves, in both the “timing” of individual poems and the historical time in which poets and poetry live.

On Poets & Poetry

William H.. Pritchard

This volume gathers 33 essays and reviews of William H. Pritchard on English and American writers. The subjects range from such novelists as Trollope, Waugh and Faulker, to such poets as Frost and Larkin and to such critics as Saintsbury, Mencken and Leavis.

Literary Essays and Reviews

Playing it by Ear

Although it does not attempt to revive the image of Frost as a benign, white-haired sage, this book presents him in a strikingly different light than did Lawrance Thompson's three-volume biography. William H. Pritchard sees Frost whole, demonstrating the complex interaction between the poet's life and work. Based not only on the poetry, but on letters, notebooks, recorded interviews and public appearances as well, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered treats the most interesting and significant aspects of Frost's life and poetry and attempts to offer an attentive, sensitive portrait of an artist whose critical reputation continues to grow.

A Literary Life Reconsidered

Frost

Wyndham Lewis

Provides introductions to the nine most interesting and important poets writing in English in the first part of this century.

Lives of the Modern Poets

Herbert F. Tucker

David Sofield

Under Criticism: Essays for William H. Pritchard boasts a literary-historical sweep that goes beyond even Pritchard's own; in format the collection represents a spectrum of contemporary criticism ranging from classroom memoirs to analytic essays-in-criticism to assessment of the state of academic letters today. Some of these various tales out of school are highly personal, and as a group they exhibit considerable ideological divergence.

Essays for William H. Pritchard

Under Criticism

Presents a look at the work, career, and literary reputation of John Updike. By the age of twenty-eight, John Updike had already been published in the three major forms - novel, poem, and short story. For the next four decades his literary career would realize itself primarily in these forms. This book offers a portrait of the writer and his work.

America's Man of Letters

Updike

A classic study of nine modern poets by a major critic and biographer.

With a New Preface by the Author

William Pritchard's collection of essays and reviews on poets and poetry ranges from Dryden and Milton through the major American and British poets of the last century. Pritchard's sensibility has been trained in the practice of attending to a poet's style and voice—of what Robert Frost once called “ear-reading.” His endeavor is not to discover hidden, buried treasures (what the poem “really means”) but to engage with instances of measured language as they reveal themelves, in both the “timing” of individual poems and the historical time in which poets and poetry live.

In this collection of essays and reviews, William H. Pritchard focuses on the work of English and American writers, most of them from the twentieth century. At a time when English studies in the academy seems increasingly impelled by historical and political concerns, Pritchard's aim is to reinstate the aesthetic as the major motive for literary study. Indeed "study" may be the wrong word for it, as the poet Philip Larkin made forcefully evident when he once snapped at an interviewer, "Oh, for Christ's sake one doesn't study poets. You read them and think, that's marvelous, how is it done, could I do it?"

William H. Pritchard

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