Abstract

A Scholarly History

The article discusses the book "A Critical Study of English Poetry," by Herbert J. Grierson and J.C. Smith. The general paucity of technical criticism and philosophical criticism suggests further that one reason Ctabbe occupies, thinly, twenty pages is that it is easy to describe him at length without reference to technic or principles. With the immensely superior Herbert, this is difficult and he gets one page. It is damaging, for instance, that the authors are evidently unfamiliar with writer Yvor Winters's revaluation of sixteenth-century lyric (Hound and Horn, 1933, Poetry, 1939); so that Googe and Turbervile are absent as always, and Gascoigne is said to he "by no means the worst poet" in the period of which he is the striking glory.