"Chistopher Yu's Nothing to Admire: The Politics of Poetic Satire from Dryden to Merrill in fact gives us plenty to admire. This is a learned, intelligent, and sophisticated book that traces the unfolding of a liberal politics of satire from the late seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century.... This is superb reading, Yu catching the rhythms and exact colors of Dryden's writing, and he reads Pope with the same clarity, suggestiveness, and intuitive sense of the poetic text." --Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
"Christopher Yu has written a beautiful and an important book. It is important because it illuminates how the liberal tradition in politics and the poetic imagination have nourished each other for more than three hundred years. It is beautiful because it is uncommonly well-written: everywhere elegant, precise and free of jargon; everywhere attentive to the arts of language that give form and expression to the political concerns of the poets under examination. Mr. Yu reveals the affinities between the liberal tradition in political thought and the classical humanism to which that tradition has more usually been understood to be antagonistic. In the process he reveals the imaginative affiliations of Dryden, Pope, Byron, Auden and Merrill, giving us, it's not too much to say, a Dryden and Pope for our own times."--Richard Feingold, University of California, Berkeley
"Christopher Yu's Nothing to Admire makes and expertly supports several large, original, timely claims: that there is an unrecognized main tradition of verse satire--of a satiric mode rather than of any particular satiric genre or genres--in English, extending from the Restoration to the present and from England to America; that this tradition is in a special critical and constructive sense an 'Augustan' one, not only where a reader may expect to find something of this sort, mainly in Dryden and Pope and perhaps in Byron and Auden, but also in Merrill; and that this tradition has the distinct, peculiar merit of exhibiting how and why poetry bears crucially on liberal promotion of the public good, according to a rediscovered traditional liberalism not possessive but intellectually and morally wise."--Frederick M. Keener, Hofstra University
Review
"Chistopher Yu's Nothing to Admire: The Politics of Poetic Satire from Dryden to Merrill in fact gives us plenty to admire. This is a learned, intelligent, and sophisticated book that traces the unfolding of a liberal politics of satire from the late seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century.... This is superb reading, Yu catching the rhythms and exact colors of Dryden's writing, and he reads Pope with the same clarity, suggestiveness, and intuitive sense of the poetic text." --Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
"Christopher Yu has written a beautiful and an important book. It is important because it illuminates how the liberal tradition in politics and the poetic imagination have nourished each other for more than three hundred years. It is beautiful because it is uncommonly well-written: everywhere elegant, precise and free of jargon; everywhere attentive to the arts of language that give form and expression to the political concerns of the poets under examination. Mr. Yu reveals the affinities between the liberal tradition in political thought and the classical humanism to which that tradition has more usually been understood to be antagonistic. In the process he reveals the imaginative affiliations of Dryden, Pope, Byron, Auden and Merrill, giving us, it's not too much to say, a Dryden and Pope for our own times."--Richard Feingold, University of California, Berkeley
"Christopher Yu's Nothing to Admire makes and expertly supports several large, original, timely claims: that there is an unrecognized main tradition of verse satire--of a satiric mode rather than of any particular satiric genre or genres--in English, extending from the Restoration to the present and from England to America; that this tradition is in a special critical and constructive sense an 'Augustan' one, not only where a reader may expect to find something of this sort, mainly in Dryden and Pope and perhaps in Byron and Auden, but also in Merrill; and that this tradition has the distinct, peculiar merit of exhibiting how and why poetry bears crucially on liberal promotion of the public good, according to a rediscovered traditional liberalism not possessive but intellectually and morally wise."--Frederick M. Keener, Hofstra University
Book Description
This study argues for a continuous genealogy of poetic satire, linking the writings of Dryden, Pope, Byron, Auden, and Merrill
About the Author
Christopher Yu has a Ph.D. in English literature from Yale. An independent scholar and writer, he currently resides in Chicago.
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