i read this when it first appeared, but I recall a substantial impression, that Pritchard had achieved what his title announces--a kind of Johnsonian exercise in biography and critique. Pritchard does this through his fine ear for voice and tone of voice. It's amazing how commonly these are ignored by modern aloudreaders--such as Obama's First Inaugural poet, a Yale prof, for heaven's sake, who had no idea how to read her own poem. She was the victim of poetry instruction over the past few decades, which has ignored the essentials of voice and tone, replaced them with the French Disease, Deconstruction, and then with verieties of political correctness. Such pretentiousness does not result in good aloudreadings--nor particularly good poems.
Hardy, Robinson, Yeats, Eliot all reward reading for Tone of Voice. Pritchard calls his Frost chapter, "Elevated Play," and his Eliot chapter, some form of amusement. I find his analysis particularly helpful in reading Hardy, a poet who needs a modern helper because of his grim fatalism, his Dorset grit. Turns out, there's an element of play and of distance in this. Having lived in Dorset off and on over the years, and having visited the Hardy sites--birthplace, Max Gate, etc--I do not find my understanding of his verse greatly increased. But reading Pritchard, I do.
So it may be said for most of the poets included here, which makes this an essential book for one's shelf. The great terror of English bookshleves, H Bloom, does not have the patience or the ear to reveal the heart of these poets. (In his books, one often encounters Hardy or Blake explicating Bloom.) Though, that said, I must appreciate Bloom's psycho-literary reading of Lucretius's "clinamen" (famous now a s "swerve") which is much more convincing, and useful, than Greenblatt's Lucretius as inventer of the modern. You may as well claim Epictetus--a thoroughly modern character, including his handicap. ( )