A reader's guide to fifty modern European poets

by John Pilling

From the Blurb: The last century and a quarter has been one of the most fertile periods for poetry in Europe and there has been a corresponding increase in interest among English-speaking readers. Although the debate about whether poetry is translatable continues, John Pilling believes that this growing readership is evidence of a substratum present in every poetic utterance which enables it to survive and withstand translation. Indeed, it would be a remarkable linguist who could tackle all the writers included here in their original language, and it would be an enormous loss to refuse to do otherwise. Apart from the five main European tongues-French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian-the study includes poets writing in Portuguese, Serbo-Croat, Polish and Greek. The book opens with a consideration of the great French poets Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, Rimbaud, who must be the starting point of any survey of modern European poetry. The author goes on to consider the brilliant generat