Building on the foundation laid by Guide to Literary Criticism, this book takes literary education a stage further: it concentrates on poetry (originally written in English and English translation). It is meant to train the reader to get to grips with the range and variety of experience as well as the range and variety of forms and styles displayed in poetry from the age of Elizabeth I to that of Elizabeth II and by poets from diverse regions – Britain, America, Europe, Africa, the West Indies, India and Sri Lanka.
The book illuminates the processes of poetic change, with distinguishable period characteristics as well as regional differences, as poetry spreads globally and its practitioners become more varied.
The examples are taken mainly from poems/extracts prescribed in examination syllabuses, especially, for the G.C.E. Ordinary Level, Advanced Level, and university examinations.
Guide to Poetry is an essential reading for success-oriented students. It is also addressed to teachers as a means of enabling them to guide the students. It would prove a rewarding experience to readers and writers of literature in English, Sinhala and Tamil, and, to all those i4nterested in the use of words – by sensitizing responses to language and by widening horizons.
D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Kelaniya, was Foundation Visiting Fellow, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge; Henry Charles Chapman Visiting Fellow, University of London; and Guest Professor at the University of Tubingen, West Germany.
A well-established critic of twentieth-century and postcolonial literature, and a leading authority on Sri Lankan English Literature, his books include Images of the Raj: South Asia in the Literature of Empire (1988), Joseph Conrad: Beyond Culture and Background (1990), Salman Rushdie (2nd edn. 2010), all published by Macmillan (London); Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (London: Routledge, 2007) and Sri Lankan English Literature and the Sri Lankan People 1917-2003 (Vijitha Yapa, 2nd edn. 2007).
He has edited Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (Canada: Broadview Press, 2nd edn. 1999) and Kaleidoscope: An Anthology of Sri Lankan English Literature Vols. 1 & 2 (Vijitha Yapa, 2007, 2010).