Hachette India

Selected Poetry and Prose

Charlotte Mew

Julia Copus

The British poet Charlotte Mew - whose 150th anniversary falls in 2019 - was regarded as one of the best poets of her age by fellow writers. She has since been neglected, but her star is beginning to rise again. This Selected Poetry and Prose is edited by Faber poet Julia Copus, who recently unveiled a blue plaque on Mew's childhood house in Doughty Street and is writing her biography.

Mew was a curious mix of New Woman and stalwart Victorian. Her poems speak to us strongly today, in these strangely mixed times of exposure and seclusion: they reveal the private agony of an isolated being who was forced to keep secret the tragedies of her personal life while being at the same time propelled by her work into the public arena. Her poetry transfigures that very private suffering into art that has a universal resonance.

Classification : Poetry
Pub Date : OCT 17, 2019
Imprint : Faber Poetry
Page Extent : 224
Binding : PB
ISBN : 9780571316182
Price : INR 1,699

Charlotte Mew

Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was an English writer notable for her short well-crafted, highly original poetry. She published short stories and essays in several periodicals before publishing the lyric poetry that secured her reputation. Her first book of poems, The Farmer's Bride (1916) was praised for its natural, direct language, including Wessex country dialect. The Rambling Sailor (1929) was a posthumous collection of 32 previously uncollected poems.

Julia Copus

Julia Copus has published four collections of poetry and been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Costa Book awards. Her most recent collection, Girlhood, was published by Faber in 2019 and was the inaugural winner of the USA's Derek Walcott Prize for best poetry collection by a non-US citizen. Other awards include First Prize in the UK's National Poetry Competition and the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Her 2021 biography of Bloomsbury poet Charlotte Mew, This Rare Spirit, was chosen by Sir Andrew Motion as a Spectator Book of the Year and described by John Carey in the Sunday Times as "a triumph of precise scholarship and imaginative sympathy". She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.