This deluxe 150th anniversary edition of Whitman's masterwork features the complete text of the 1855 poem in its original and complete form, with a specially commissioned introductory essay by bestselling critic Harold Bloom.

Edwin Arlington Robinson's finely crafted, formal rhythms mirror the tension the poet sees between life's immutable circumstances and humanity's often tragic attempts to exert control. At once dramatic and witty, his poems lay bare the loneliness and despair of life in genteel small towns, the tyranny of love, and unspoken, unnoticed suffering. The fictional characters he created in 'Reuben Bright', 'Miniver Cheery', and 'Richard Cory' and the historical figures he brought to life - Lincoln in 'The Master' and the great painter in 'Rembrandt to Rembrandt' - harbour demons and passions the world treats with indifference or cruelty. With an introduction that sheds light on Robinson's influence on poets from Eliot and Pound to Frost and Berryman, this collection brings an unjustly neglected poet to a new generation of readers.

"The Unremarkable Wordsworth " was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

William Wordsworth was attacked by the critics of his time for imposing unremarkable sights and sentiments on his audience. In this book's title essay, an exemplary reading of the Westminster Bridge sonnet, Geoffrey Hartman shows how Wordsworth's "unremarkable phrases" attain their curious vigor. Drawing upon the propositions of semiological analysis--that signs are not signs unless they become perceptible, through the contrast between "marked" and "unmarked"--Hartman, in a deft and sensitive analysis, is able to play these notions of marking and the unremarkable off against each other. Wordsworth, in the end, overcomes both his critics and the science of signs: his quiet sonnet--with its muted or near-absent signs--is itself, as epitaph for an era, a faithful sign of the times.

Hartman's capacity to open up a dialogue between contemporary theory and Wordsworth's poetry informs all of these essays, written since the 1964 publication of Wordsworth's Poetry, a book that marked an epoch in the study of that poet and of Romantic poetry in general. In the years since then, the nature of literary study has changed dramatically, and Hartman has been a leader in the turn to theoretical modes of interpretation. The fifteen essays in "The Unremarkable Wordsworth" draw upon a wide range of contemporary theoretical approaches, from psychoanalysis to structuralism, from deconstruction to phenomenology. Yet, as Donald Marshall points out in his foreword, "Wordsworth remains so much the focus of this book that 'critical method' is strangely transmuted." For Hartman, reading and thinking are inseparable; he has an uncanny power to convey in an intensified form the poet's own consciousness, not under the rubric of "intertextuality" but because he "has ears to hear."

Geoffrey H. Hartman is Karl Young Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University. His most recent book is "Easy Pieces." Donald G. Marshall is a professor of English at the University of Iowa.

Focusing on the poems of Wordsworth's "Great Decade," feminist critics have tended to see Wordsworth as an exploiter of women and "feminine" perspectives. In this original work, Judith Page examines works from throughout Wordsworth's long career to offer a more nuanced feminist account of the poet's values. She asks questions about Wordsworth and women from the point of view of the women themselves and of 18th- and 19th-century culture. Making extensive use of family letters, journals and other documents, as well as unpublished material by the poet's daughter Dora Wordsworth, Page presents Wordsworth as a poet not defined primarily by egotistical sublimity but by his complicated and conflicted endorsement of domesticity and familial life.