Wordsworth and Coleridge: Promising Losses assembles essays spanning the last thirty years, including a selection of Peter Larkin's original verse, with the concept of promise and loss serving as the uniting narrative thread.

This book examines how the concept of the poet as a male professional emerged during the Restoration and 18th century. Analyzing works by writers from Rochester to Johnson, Linda Zionkowski argues that the opportunities for publication created by the growth of a commercial market in texts profoundly challenged aristocratic conceptions of authorship and altered the status of professional poets on the hierarchies of class and gender. The book proposes that during this period, discourse about the poet’s social role both revealed and produced a crucial shift in configurations of masculinity: the belief that commodifying their mental labor undermined writers’ cultural authority gave way to a celebration of the market’s function as the proving ground for both literary merit and bourgeois manhood.

Poetry is composed of sensation: this Deleuze-Guattarian assertion is central to a Deleuzian poetics that provides a fruitful approach to the difficulties of innovative literature and poetry in particular. This book is a clear exposition of a Deleuzian approach to literature that treats the literary text, particularly the poem, as something that exists in its own right. As such poetry is presented as something that must be encountered, actualised and embodied by readers on its own terms, rather than providing access to something else that it represents. Far from being a hermetic, ivory tower encounter, the Deleuzian poetics of experimental reading reveals sensational significances that are not only philosophical and social but political. What's more, through a close examination of a range of contemporary innovative poems, Jon Clay suggests that a Deleuzian way of reading offers a firm purchase on notoriously difficult texts, providing concepts and a language that aids their understanding.

The practice of poetry in the Victorian period was characterised by an extreme diversity of styles, preoccupations and subject-matter. This anthology attempts to draw out some of the main focuses of interest in the Victorian poet. No Victorian poet produced an overall theory of poetry, yet all accepted it as a natural vehicle of expression, and for some subjects, in particular sexuality, the only literary mode. Indeed, the sexual question was made even more acute by the sudden phenomenon of the 'poetess', and the relation of poetry to gender raised interesting new critical questions. At the same time, the cultural role of the poet came under increasing debate: Victorian poetry was the first contemporary poetry to be studied. This selection of central texts illustrates these pressures on the Victorian practice of poetry, and the introductory remarks suggest ways in which theory can be related to the understanding key poems themselves.

Wordsworth's classical education presents an amazing paradox: gifted teachers trained him in the full rigors of classical Latin and Greek, but his schoolmasters were committed to the Classics and to modern literature. Through them, Wordsworth developed a profound love for the Classics and thus an enlightened zeal for a new poetry, a poetry capable of being compared with and even daring to compete with the classical texts he so dearly loved. Richard Clancey's meticulously researched study presents new biographical information on Wordsworth's classical education and new facts about the education of his teachers.

Ovid was the most influential and widely imitated of all classical Latin poets. This volume publishes papers delivered at a conference on the Reception of Ovid in March 2013, jointly organised by the Institute of Classical Studies and the Warburg Institute, University of London. It presents studies of the impact of Ovid's work on Renaissance commentators, on neo-Latin poetry and epistolography, on Renaissance engravers, on poets like Dante, Mantuan, Pontano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Lodge, Weever, Milton and Cowley and on artists including Correggio and Rubens. The main focus of the volume is inevitably the afterlife of the Metamorphoses but it also includes discussions of the impact of Heroides, Fasti, and Ibis, and publishes for the first time a Latin verse life of Ovid composed around 1460 by Bernardo Moretti. Contributors are Helene Casanova-Robin, Frank T. Coulson, Fatima Diez-Plazas, Ingo Gildenhard, Philip Hardie, Maggie Kilgour, Gesine Manuwald, Elizabeth McGrath, John Miller, Victoria Moul, Caroline Stark, and Herica Valladares.

This volume explores the relationship between the poetry of the mainstream and kinds of modernist poetry that have had to make their way outside it. Mainstream poets like Paul Muldoon, James Fenton and Carol Ann Duffy multiply voices and so draw on resources from the novel - Bakhtin's concept of the dialogic is therefore used to explain their techniques. By contrast, Shklovsky's concept of "estrangement" is shown to be more useful in accounting for the radical experimentation of poets like Edwin Morgan, Christopher Middleton and Denise Riley. However, the book concludes by suggesting that - partly because of the influence of surrealism in women poets like Selima Hill and Jo Shapcott - the mainstream has recently been infiltrated by modernist and postmodernist estrangement effects.

This study examines Hart Crane's canonical ambitions in "The Bridge" and argues for a new species of epic, "the modernist epic," which also includes Pound's "The Cantos," Eliot's "The Waste Land," and Williams's "Paterson." It offers a close reading of "The Bridge" as a hybrid of lyric and epic modes. Crane's sublime and history converge in a complex synthesis of form and ideas. The study reconceives Crane's achievement by locating him in an intertextual system of production while also recognizing his poetic making of self. Yet in this work Crane assumes a greater political presence than much commentary has entertained.

Questions about how ancient Greek texts establish their authority, reflect on each other, and project their own truths have become central for a wide range of recent critical discourses. In this volume, an influential group of international scholars examines these themes in a variety of poetic and rhetorical genres. The result is a series of striking and original readings from different critical perspectives that display the centrality of these questions for understanding the poetic and rhetorical aims of ancient Greek texts. Characterized by a combination of close attention to philological detail and theoretical sophistication, the essays in this volume make a compelling case for this kind of focused, critically informed dialogue about the nature of ancient textual praxis. Students of classical literature will find a wealth of critical insights and challenging new readings of many familiar texts.

J.L. Bradley's chronology captures much of the drama and excitement of Shelley's life. This is an informative, often witty account which will be extremely valuable to all Shelley students, scholars and enthusiasts. A section on the Shelley circle is a particularly helpful supplement to the main body of the book.

The 1990s have witnessed a major reassessment of Blake initiated by a new and more rigorous comprehension of his modes of production, which in turn has led to re-evaluation of other literary and cultural contexts for his work. Blake in the Nineties grapples with the implications of the new bibliography for Blake studies, in its editorial, interpretative, and historical dimensions. As well as providing an international overview of recent Blake criticism, the collection contributes to current debates in a variety of disciplines dealing with the Romantic period, including art history, counter-Enlightenment-scholarship, theology and hermeneutic theory.

Traditionally, Wordsworth s greatness is founded on his identity as the poet of nature and solitude. The Wordsworthian imagination is seen as an essentially private faculty, its very existence premised on the absence of other people. In this title, first published in 1987, David Simpson challenges this established view of Wordsworth, arguing that it fails to recognize and explain the importance of the context of the public sphere and the social environment to the authentic experience of the imagination. Wordsworth s preoccupation with the metaphors of property and labour shows him to be acutely anxious about the value of his art in a world that he regarded as corrupted. Through close examination of a few important poems, both well-known and relatively unknown, Simpson shows that there is no unitary, public Wordsworth, nor is there a conflict or tension between the private and the public. The absence of any clear kind of authority in the voice that speaks the poems makes Wordsworth s poetry, in Simpson s phrase, a poetry of displacement . "

This book covers the life and work of a wide range of writers from Coleridge to Wollstonecraft, Hemans, Beckford and their contemporaries. Also encompassing a wealth of material on contexts from the treason trials of 1794 to the coming of gas-light to the London stage in 1817, it provides a panorama of one of the richest periods in British culture.

A pioneering critic, educator, and poet, I. A. Richards (1893-1979) helped the English-speaking world decide not only what to read but how to read it. Acknowledged "father" of New Criticism, he produced the most systematic body of critical writing in the English language since Coleridge. His method of close reading dominated the English-speaking classroom for half a century. John Paul Russo draws on close personal acquaintance with Richards as well as on unpublished materials, correspondence, and interviews, to write the first biography (originally published in 1989) of one of last century's most influential and many-sided men of letters.

In Imagining the Text, James Brown examines ekphrasis - the verbal representation of a visual representation - in Wirnt von Gravenberg's thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Wigalois, one of the most popular and enduring stories in the Middle High German literary tradition. Through close reading of the text and examining illustrated Wigalois manuscripts, early print editions, and frescoes, Brown explores how ekphrasis structures the narrative, harmonizes potential conflicts in the text, and contributes to the construction of courtly identity. Imagining the Text demonstrates that the vibrant symbiosis of word and image is crucial to the poem's sustained popularity for more than six hundred years, and contributes to the history of the book and to the study of medieval and modern modes of perception.

Modernist poet H.D. had many visionary and paranormal experiences throughout her life. Although Sigmund Freud worried that they might be 'symptoms,' she rebelled, educating herself in the alternative world of the occult and spiritualism in order to transform the raw material into a mythical autobiography woven throughout her poetry, prose, and life-writing. The Astral H.D. narrates the fascinating story of how she used the occult to transform herself, and provides surprising revelations about her friendships and conflicts with famous figures-such as Sigmund Freud and the Battle of Britain War Hero Hugh Dowding-along the way.

Martjie Bosman se debuutbundel, wat in 2003 met die Ingrid Jonkerprys vir poesie bekroon is. Die verse in hierdie versameling getuig van sterk beheer oor verstegniek, sober eenvoud en uitgebreide kennis van die breer literatuurlandskap. Dit spreek ook van intense meelewing met die geskiedenis en die natuur.

Dowdy uncovers and analyzes the primary rhetorical strategies, particularly figures of voice, in American political poetry from the Vietnam War-era to the present. He brings together a unique and diverse collection of poets, including an innovative section on hip hop performance.

Two and a half centuries after his birth, Blake's influence on later generations of writers and artists is more important than ever, extending into film, psychology, children's literature, and graphic novels as well as poetry, painting, and fiction. "Blake, Modernity, and Popular Culture" explores the ways in which Blake reacted to the subcultures of his day, as well as how he has inspired popular, modernist and postmodernist figures until the present day.

Ambrose Bierce was born in 1842 and mysteriously disappeared in 1914. During his lifetime, he was a controversial and prolific writer, and there is growing interest in his works. As a Union soldier during the Civil War, he witnessed bloodshed and the atrocities of battle. After the war, he began a career as a journalist in San Francisco, where many of his newspaper columns were filled with venom and daring. In addition, he wrote war stories and tales of the supernatural, along with an assortment of poems. Today, he is probably best remembered as the author of "The Devil's Dictionary, " originally published as "The Cynic's Dictionary" in 1906. This reference is a guide to his life and writings.

An opening essay overviews Bierce's contribution to literature and journalism, and a chronology summarizes the most important events in his life. The bulk of the Companion comprises alphabetically arranged entries on Bierce's major works and characters and on historical persons and writers who figured prominently in his life and career. Thus the volume provides coverage of Bierce's contemporaries, many of whom he satirized in his scathing newspaper columns. Many of the entries list works for further reading, and the book closes with a selected, general bibliography. Because of Bierce's concern with so many issues of his day, the volume offers a valuable perspective on American culture during the time in which he lived.

Why are material objects so prominent in European Romantic literature, both as symbol and organizing device? This collection of essays maintains that European Romantic culture and its aesthetic artifacts were fundamentally shaped by "object aesthetics," an artistic idiom of acknowledging, through a profound and often disruptive use of objects, the movement of Western aesthetic practice into Romantic self-projection and imagination. Of course Romanticism, in all its dissonance and anxiety, is marked by a number of new artistic practices, all of which make up a new aesthetics, accounting for the dialectical and symbolistic view of literature that began in the late eighteenth century. "Romanticism and the Object" adds to our understanding of that aesthetics by reexamining a wide range of texts in order to discover how the use of objects works in the literature of the time.

This work takes a new approach to the evolution of the modern English lyric, emphasizing the way in which several generations of poets, reacting to post-Reformation readers' dislike for invented poetic narratives, competed for the right to commemorate important public occasions and slowly expanded the range of acceptable occasions. The book demonstrates that many fundamental features of a typical modern lyric actually evolved as responses to the limitations of occasional poetry.

Even if Bentham and Coleridge] had had no great influence they would still have been the classical examples they are of two great opposing types of mind. . . . And as we follow Mill's analysis, exposition and evaluation of this pair of opposites we are at the same time, we realize, forming a close acquaintance with a mind different from either. From the introduction