Any text, prose or poetry, carries much more information within it than its creator realized or intended. What was implicit knowledge for the poet and his Anglo-Saxon audience may need to be made explicit for us, and the possibility that one's judgements are ethnocentric has always to be reckoned with. Just the same, many of the poet's beliefs and prejudices are downright familiar, and others respond to analysis. The essential caveat is that the framework within which judgements are made needs to be set up before fine literary details are filled in. Good readers have probably always done this, consciously or unconsciously; bad readers have approached the poem already burdened with their own hypothetical 'Scyldingids'.
Author(s): Tom A. Shippey
Series: Studies in English Literature, 70
Publisher: Edward Arnold
Year: 1978
Language: English
Pages: 64
City: London
1. INTRODUCTION 7
2. THE WORLD OF THE POEM 12
Words and meaning 12
Characters and emotions 15
Money, worth, prestige 18
Swords, halls, and symbols 21
Allusion and reality 24
3. THE STRUCTURE OF THE POEM 28
Balance and interlace 28
The implications of digression 29
The ironic image 34
Performatives and perceptions 38
The heathens and the monsters 41
4. POETRY AND ITS FUNCTIONS 45
Compounds, variations, formulas 45
Fragmentation and control 48
Stasis, pleonasm, cumulation 51
The gnomic voice 55
5. AFTERWORD 59
FURTHER READING 62
INDEX 63
