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christopherc's review
2.0
This was the first book-length study of the great English modernist, but it isn’t a very worthwhile one. The authors write for other academics in conformance to a format which confers academic prestige but is likely to be tiresome to general fans of Prynne, thus the book abounds with references to Bakhtin and Kristeva. This just mystifies the text and prevents it from being a clear, accessible introduction to Prynne’s poetry. It’s a pity, because two decades later these two authors published an annotated edition of Prynne’s collection The Oval Window where the Introduction serves as a very friendly, jargon-free introduction to what makes Prynne’s poetry special and how one goes about tackling it. Obviously the difference there is that they were finally writing for a general audience instead of within the ivory tower.
The close readings of several Prynne poems that appear herein are plainly incomplete. The discussion of “Thoughts on the Eszterhazy Court Uniform” is ignorant of the fact that Prynne’s reference to Haydn is specifically to the composer’s “Farewell” symphony, which is really the key to the poem. The authors are great fans of The Oval Window and some of their notes on its language are still helpful, but their insights are still limited compared to the aforementioned annotated edition where they had access to Prynne’s personal archive.
The close readings of several Prynne poems that appear herein are plainly incomplete. The discussion of “Thoughts on the Eszterhazy Court Uniform” is ignorant of the fact that Prynne’s reference to Haydn is specifically to the composer’s “Farewell” symphony, which is really the key to the poem. The authors are great fans of The Oval Window and some of their notes on its language are still helpful, but their insights are still limited compared to the aforementioned annotated edition where they had access to Prynne’s personal archive.