Serious Poetry

'In Peter McDonald's important, intelligent and provocative book, a principled attention to form yields genuine insights which elude most critics... Mcdonald's reading of Hill is, like all his readings, perspicacious and revealing.' -Adam Kirsch, Times Literary SupplementPeter McDonald offers a controversial reading of twentieth-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Serious Poetry provocatively returns these writers to the elements of difficulty and cultural disagreement where they belong.