Language Recreated - by Harold Skulsky (Paperback)

About the Book

A searching contribution to the study of what gurative language is and how it works, this book is a guide to the sophisticated and powerful artistry of the seventeenth-century English poets who have come to be known by the misleading name of "Metaphysicals."

Book Synopsis

A searching contribution to the study of what gurative language is and how it works, this book is a guide to the sophisticated and powerful artistry of the seventeenth-century English poets who have come to be known by the misleading name of "Metaphysicals." Harold Skulsky argues that "Metaphorists" is the more apt label. After exploring the dramatic and transactional theory of figurative language that these poets owe to the traditions they share, Skulsky gives close and carefully argued readings of their major poems. We watch metaphor being enacted rather than made in a high-stakes game of cue and response between writer and reader, a game sustained by a network of mutual understandings. In effect, Skulsky provides a reader-friendly manual of the skills we need to be players.

Review Quotes

"The author takes on nearly all of the theoretical establishment and most of the twentieth-century critics of Donne, Herbert, Cranshaw, and Vaughan. I think this may be the most important book about the way seventeenth-century English verse works since Rosemond Tuve's "Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery"."--Joseph H. Summers

About the Author

Harold Skulsky is the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at Smith College, and is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Hofstra University. His works include "Spirits Finely Touched: The Testing of Value and Integrity in Four Shakespearean Plays" and "Language Recreated: Seventeenth-Century Metaphorists and the Act of Metaphor" (both Georgia), as well as "Metamorphosis: The Mind in Exile," "Milton and the Death of Man: Humanism on Trial in Paradise Lost," and "Staring into the Void: Spinoza the Master of Nihilism."