The Death of Saul and Other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses

Manning, J. C.Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 1.8
Word count
229K words
Chapters
23

Tags

English Originals Modern Poetry Classical MeterPrize VersePoetry CollectionWalesReligious ImageryMusical Rhythm

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous VersesAuthor: Manning, J. C.,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Mar 15, 2007

Editor's review

This book is a collection of English poems by J. C. Manning, gathered after winning an Eisteddfod poetry prize and including other miscellaneous verses. The Eisteddfod is a traditional Welsh literary and musical competition, a background that often lends the poems a ceremonial, declamatory, and moral-allegorical flavor. The title poem, The Death of Saul, draws on the biblical narrative and is well suited to observing how a Victorian poet handled tragic historical material in blank verse or meter; the miscellaneous poems cover occasional, elegiac, and descriptive pieces, offering a glimpse of the writing ecology of local men of letters at the time. As a public-domain ebook from Project Gutenberg, it is better suited as supplementary material for the history of English poetry, Welsh cultural studies, or Victorian regional literature than as a popular trade book. It is best read as a historical document: attend to diction, allusion, and rhetorical convention rather than expecting modern emotional impact.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Begin with the title poem The Death of Saul, comparing it with the relevant chapters of the biblical Books of Samuel to understand how the material is adapted.
  2. Browse the miscellaneous poems grouped by theme, noting the conventions and structures of occasional and elegiac verse respectively.
  3. Read alongside background material on the Eisteddfod, noting how the prize context influenced the poetic style.
  4. If English is difficult, read each poem's title and first and last stanzas first, then decide which pieces to read closely.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
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  21. 21
  22. 22
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FAQ

Is this book only available in English? According to Project Gutenberg records, this book is a public-domain English ebook with no Chinese translation. Chinese readers need some English reading ability or should use it with a dictionary and annotated editions.
What is the Eisteddfod? The Eisteddfod is a traditional Welsh literary and musical competition covering poetry, prose, music, and other categories. The book's title indicates that the poems collected won prizes at this event, a background that helps in understanding the poems' forms and thematic orientation.
What is the title poem The Death of Saul about? According to the title and public-domain common knowledge, the poem draws on the biblical narrative of the death of Saul, king of Israel. The specific handling of the lines must be judged from the original; readers may consult the relevant chapters of the Books of Samuel to observe how the poet develops the tragedy.
Is it suitable as an introductory poetry reader? Not very. This book is a collection of nineteenth-century prize poems from a regional competition together with miscellaneous verse; its language and allusions are distant from our time, making it more suitable for readers with prior experience in reading English poetry or for those reading with a research purpose.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Manning, J. C. Author

J. C. Manning is the author of The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses. Public information about this author is very limited: the full English name, nationality, dates of birth and death, and educational background cannot be confirmed, and only this one work is held in the collection. Judging from the title, the book contains poems on the death of King Saul, other pieces that won prizes at the traditional Welsh Eisteddfod poetry festivals, and a number of miscellaneous verses. It can therefore be inferred that Manning's writing was connected with English-language poetry and with Welsh local poetry competitions, and that the works combine religious and historical themes with the character of festival competition verse. The collection reflects the common features of English-language versification around the nineteenth century. The author may have attracted some attention through poetry competitions, but records are scarce, and a complete biography remains difficult to reconstruct.