The Rattle Bag: An Anthology of Poetry: 1

Product Information

Which brings me, in conclusion, to the kit bag - which might have been the title of The School Bag . In the end, we were swayed to the school bag because the kit bag had such a strong association with military action and suggested the solidarity of massed ranks rather than the sympathies of a well-schooled and many-minded individual. It conveyed an impression of positive certitude and imperial destiny rather than negative capability and common humanity. In our time, after all, a post-colonial time, in a world of multi-ethnic populations, the image of the marching man in khaki uniform, with his gun and his gear, is more of a menace than a promise. it also contains some poems that are pretty problematic wrt stereotypes and racism - these could easily have been omitted. Plus, since the new remake just dropped on Disney+, now is the perfect time to introduce our students to the classic version that we grew up with.

The Rattle Bag: An Anthology of Poetry - Goodreads The Rattle Bag: An Anthology of Poetry - Goodreads

the collection contains a few poems translated into English from Irish, Welsh, Swedish, (as far as I read), but still feels very limited.As editors, in other words, we were both products of a system that was fundamentally the one established by Renaissance humanists and grammarians in the 16th century. For all the revision of syllabi and inflection of the educational aims that had occurred in the intervening 400 years, there was one respect in which the 20th-century schools we attended resembled those that the Elizabethan authors in our anthologies would have attended 400 years earlier: we were still expected to fill our minds with what was on offer from the past, to remember it, to prove by examination that we retained it, and to prepare ourselves to think, feel and act in accordance with it during the years to come. the anthology was very white Anglo-European/North American male poet dominated. it felt abit like they chose poems considered 'classics', with a purpose, rather than a more interesting and wide ranging selection. The School Bag was meant as an intervention at Eliot's second stage of education in poetry, when the element of enjoyment is being enlarged into appreciation, when there is an intellectual addition, an organisation of the field. Consequently, the spirit in which Ted and I approached the compilation of this second volume was imbued with a new purpose. The poems were to be read less as Frostian "playthings in the playhouse" of the language and more as Yeatsian "monuments of [the soul's] magnificence". The first one in the book is very deliberately Yeats's "Long Legged Fly", which begins "That civilisation may not sink, / Its great battle lost . . ." while the last one is a chorus from Dryden's Secular Masque , which ends: "Tis well an old age is out / And time to begin a new". As the millennium approached, it was as if we wanted to do something definitive and affirmative, to express in our work as anthologists a determination expressed by Andrew Marvell in the poem "To his Coy Mistress": - a determination to "roll all our strength, and all / Our sweetness, up into one ball . . ."

The Rattle Bag by Seamus Heaney | Goodreads The Rattle Bag by Seamus Heaney | Goodreads

I was optimistic about this anthology of poetry - a selection compiled/chosen by a couple of poets I quite like... but I was disappointed.When my wife and I lived in Belfast in the late 1960s, our neighbours were an elderly couple called Wilson. In those days we had two toddlers in the house and they used to spend as much time with the Wilsons as they did at home. And one of the things Mrs Wilson used to repeat to the elder of them offers a good way into this discussion. "Michael," she would tell him, "you and Christopher are growing up, Granda Wilson and I are growing down, and your daddy and mammy are standing still."