ABSTRACT
HOBSBAUM’s study offers itself as an informal history of poetry in English, trying to steer a path between scant literary reference and selection to the point of ceasing to be a history at all. It begins with the medieval Piers Plowman, and moves through the traditional major poets like Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth, to some of the significant figures of the twentieth century. Its opening claim, that “the concept of tradition in this book is the key theme that links its several chapters together”, announces its ideological and methodological preoccupations, and its limitations. Against this “tradition” is measured the “experiment”, which is regarded as the damage done to the “tradition” by too much imitation of foreign modes. This is a study that is now very dated, absorbing as it does many assumptions into its analysis which are now regarded as passé-if not also politically suspect-after the introduction of greater theoretical selfconsciousness in the past decade. With hindsight, its ideological prejudices are so clearly portrayed on its sleeve that this book best demonstrates how all “history” can in turn be historicised.
