Gascoyne, David. (1916 - 2001).
W o r k
S u r r e a l i s m :
A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935):
- one of the most determined British apologists for the surreal experiment
Man’s Life is This Meat (1936) and Hölderlin’s Madness (1938):
- collections of often obsessively odd poems
- includes his own surrealist work and his translations of French surrealists
“Figure in a Landscape’:
- enacts a kind of ritual awakening nodding to the iterations of Eliot
“The Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis”:
- intermixes the extraordinary, the challenging, and the unapologetically silly
- dispenses with capital letters and with punctuation
W a r P o e t r y :
Poems 1937-1942 (1943):
- an illustrated collection of poems from the period of his stay in Paris
- shifts from surrealism towards a more explicitly religious sensibility
A Vagrant and Other Poems (1950) and Night Thoughts (1956):
- collections of his later metaphysical and religious poems
“Farewell Chorus”:
- greets the ‘New Year 1940’ x but: laments at the uneding war
“Walking at Whitsun”:
- wonders at an ‘inhuman’ and ‘unreal’ English landscape haunted by war
Quote
"the pavements of cities are covered with needles / the reservoirs are full of human hair / fumes of sulphur envelop the houses of ill-fame / out of which bloodred lilies appear"
From "And the Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis" (1933).
Basics
(Photo: Squidoo).
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Author
David Gascoyne. (1916 - 2001). British. -
Work
Poet. Author of Hölderlin's Madness (1938). -
Genres
Surrealism. War poetry.
Literature
Abrams, Meyer Howard, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
Barnard, Robert. Stručné dějiny anglické literatury. Praha: Brána, 1997.
Baugh, Albert C. ed. A Literary History of England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.
Coote, Stephen. The Penguin Short History of English Literature. London: Penguin, 1993.
Sampson, George. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946.
Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. New York: Clarendon Press, 1994.