Product Description: This collection makes the case for literary criticism as an informed, aggressive, personal, and often humorous response to writers and writing. An unrepentant academic, William Pritchard nonetheless finds himself looking vainly , in much current professional study of literature, for what he sees as criticism 's central task...read more

Product Description: William Pritchard’s collection of essays and reviews on poets and poetry ranges from Dryden and Milton through the major American and British poets of the last century. One of them, Philip Larkin, answered an interviewer’s question about what he had learned from his study of other poets by snapping back, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t study poets! You read them, and think: That’s marvelous; how is it done?” Although Pritchard has been talking with students about poets for more than fifty years, his practice in writing has Larkin’s question in mind: how to describe convincingly the way it’s done, the “marvelous” creations of Tennyson, Hardy, Yeats, Robert Lowell, or Larkin himself...read more

Product Description: By the age of twenty-eight, John Updike had already been published in the three major forms―novel, poem, and short story―he would continue to explore with steadily expanding skill and authority. For the next four decades his literary career would realize itself primarily in these three forms, but also in essays, reviews, and memoirs, and in resourceful commentary on his own work―the stuff of many interviews and prefaces...read more

Product Description: In this collection of essays and reviews, William H. Pritchard focuses on the work of English and American writers, most of them from the twentieth century. At a time when English studies in the academy seems increasingly impelled by historical and political concerns, Pritchard's aim is to reinstate the aesthetic as the major motive for literary study...read more

Product Description: American literary life has been enriched over the past generation by habits of criticism practiced at Amherst College during the tenure of William H. Pritchard. These essays, which were commissioned as a tribute to Pritchard, celebrate his fortieth year at Amherst and demonstrate the breadth of his influence in the fields of theory, criticism, and pedagogy...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: William H. Pritchard's study of Hardy, Yeats, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Hart Crane, and William Carlos Williams has been considered a classic ever since original publication in 1980. Readable, accessible, and focused on poems, it is criticism at its best, unaffected by particular theoretical trends...read more

Re-evaluates the individual successes of nine modern poets including Hardy, Yeats, Frost, Pound, and Eliot by presenting biographies, character studies, and critical appraisals of their works

Product Description: "Could one, after all this purposeful work, have become an anachronism? A dinosaur? Replaceable?"--from English PapersWell-known critic William H. Pritchard reviews his life as a passionate student and teacher of English in the classrooms of New England's Amherst College...read more

Product Description: This volume gathers together thirty-three essays and reviews by one of America's liveliest critics. William H. Pritchard's books on English and American writers and his critical biographies of Robert Frost and Randall Jarrell are well known...read more

Analyzes the poetry and prose of Randall Jarrell and details the significant events and experiences of his life and their influence on his work

Gathers poems from each period in Jarrell's career, from narratives of wartime experiences to scenes from everyday life

Product Description: This elegantly written study concentrates on the complex interaction between Jarrell's life and work, describing and commenting on his most important poems and prose, but also focusing on the significant events and experiences of his life...read more

An incisive analysis of the complex interaction between the poet's life and work offers a chronological approach to Frost's life and poetry

Surveys work produced by English writers between the two world wars, stressing their shared disillusion and assessing the value of each writer to today's readers