A revelatory and deeply personal history of twentieth-century poetry
by prize-winning poet and memoirist John Burnside
Poetry helps us to make sense of our world, transforming what the
Russian poet Osip Mandelstam called the "noise of time" into a kind of
music. The Music of Time is a unique history of twentieth-century
poetry by one of today's most acclaimed poets, blending incandescent
personal meditations with rare insights about a broad range of poets who
distilled the essence of the moment, gave voice to our griefs and joys,
and shaped our collective memory.
Bringing together poets from times and places as diverse as Tsarist
Russia, 1960s Harlem, and Ireland at the height of the Troubles, John
Burnside reveals how poetry responded to the dramatic events of the
century while shaping our impressions of them. He takes readers from the
trenches of World War I to a prison cell in Nazi Germany, and from
Rilke's grave in the Swiss Alps to Dylan Thomas's Welsh seaside. His
luminous narrative is woven through with insights into the poet's
creative process as well as lyrical and thought-provoking digressions on
topics ranging from marriage to the Kennedy assassination.
A spellbinding work of literary history, The Music of Time reveals how
poets engaged with the most important issues and events of the twentieth
century, and bears personal witness to the beauty and power of an art
form unlike any other.
