The author explores the impact on poetic practice in the 1970s and 1980s of recent theoretical developments, offering a criticism of the latest work of Seamus Heaney and of younger poets including Michael Hofmann and James Fenton, reassessing life on Mars and providing retrospective surveys of Fleur Adcock, Douglas Dunn, Geoffrey Hill, Tom Paulin and Anne Stevenson.

Taking as its starting point Delmore Schwartz's self-appointment as both a 'poet of the Hudson River' and 'laureate of the Atlantic, ' this book comprehensively reassesses the poetic achievement of a critically neglected writer. Runchman reads Schwartz's poetry in relation to its national and international perspectives

Destabilizing Milton challenges the widely accepted view of Milton as a poet of absolute, unquestioning certainty. In Paradise Lost , Milton confronts the failure of the Revolution by creating a poem that refuses to grant the reader any interpretive stability or certainty. Doubts can no longer be contained and concepts once marked by a 'fundamental immobility' now seem unstable at best. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes equally reflect Milton's deep ambivalences after the collapse of the Republic. Far from confirming his earlier ideals, in his later poetry, Milton subjects his culture's most cherished beliefs, such as the goodness of God, to withering scrutiny, while refusing the comfort of orthodox answers.

What have we learned from the first experiments performed at the reconstructed Globe on Bankside? What light have recent productions shed on the way Shakespeare intended his plays to be seen? Written by the Leverhulme Fellow appointed to study and record actor use of this new-old playhouse, here is the first analytical account of the discoveries that have been made in its important first years, in workshops, rehearsals and performances. It shows how actors, directors and playgoers have responded to the demands of 'historical' constraints (and unexpected freedoms) to provide valuable new insights into the dynamics of Elizabethan theatre.

This book argues that Romantic-era writers used the figure of the minstrel to imagine authorship as a social, responsive enterprise unlike the solitary process portrayed by Romantic myths of the lone genius. Simpson highlights the centrality of the minstrel to many important literary developments from the Romantic era through to the 1840s.

From the publication of his first major volume in 1946, "Lord Weary's Castle, " to a few years before his death in 1977, Robert Lowell held sway as the premier English-language poet of his time. "Lord Weary's Castle" seemed to push poetic language and cultural critique in exciting new directions, yet they were directions sanctioned by the New Criticism of his time. In 1959, Lowell's "Life Studies" dramatically broke the very traditions he had previously revitalized. During the 1960s, his works elaborated his new poetic mode and engaged with personal, political, and historical issues. But with the 1973 publication of his poetic trilogy, "History, For Lizzie and Harriet, " and "The Dolphin, " his reputation suffered. Though his final work, the autobiographical "Day by Day"--published shortly before his death in 1977--was favorably received, critics continued to attack him in the decades that followed.

Thus Lowell's reputation, as this volume makes clear, has fluctuated, and at the close of the twentieth century, there is still no critical consensus about any aspect of his work. This book provides a representative sample of the critical discourse concerning Lowell's poetry, drama, and prose, and shows that discourse at its most varied and vital. An introductory essay surveys the response to Lowell's writings. The first three sections then track Lowell's volumes chronologically. Most of his books receive one or two reviews followed by several scholarly essays, arranged in the order of their publication. Along with the reprinted articles are two essays written specifically for this volume. The fourth section presents several broad overviews of Lowell and his works, and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources concludes the book. The volume also contains an essay by Lowell himself, in which he reflects on his career.

This classic edition of Donne's Divine Poems contains an extensive and invaluable critical apparatus by Helen Gardner.

Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice vigorously engages with the Why? and the How? of prose poetry, a form that is currently enjoying a surge in popularity. With contributions by both practitioners and academics, this volume seeks to explore how its distinctive properties guide both writer and reader, and to address why this form is so well suited to the early twenty-first century. With discussion of both classic and less well- known writers, the essays both illuminate prose poetry's distinctive features and explore how this "outsider" form can offer a unique way of viewing and describing the uncertainties and instabilities which shape our identities and our relationships with our surroundings in the early twenty-first century. Combining insights on the theory and practice of prose poetry, Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice offers a timely and valuable contribution to the development of the form, and its appreciation amongst practitioners and scholars alike. Largely approached from a practitioner perspective, this collection provides vivid snapshots of contemporary debates within the prose poetry field while actively contributing to the poetics and craft of the form.

Developing a reading of modernist poetics centred on the three-way relationship between literature, modern physics and avant-garde art movements, this book focuses on four key poets - William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Wallace Stevens - whose lives crossed paths in 20th-century New York. This book explores how modernist art movements have shaped these writers' thinking about physics in relation to their work, demonstrating how science's new ideas about measurement and how to visualize material reality provoked innovative poetic forms and images. From Einstein's visit to New York City in 1921 to the impact of the atomic bomb, the author traces the flow of ideas about physics through culture, linking the new physics with modern approaches to art found in Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism.

In the nineteenth century the beauty of the night sky is the source of both imaginative wonder in poetry and political and commercial power through navigation. The Romantic Imagination and Astronomy examines the impact of astronomical discovery and imperial exploration on poets including Barbauld, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Rossetti.

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) has often been considered a particularly British writer in part as his official post as Poet Laureate inevitably committed him to a certain amount of patriotic writing. This volume focuses on his impact on the continent, presenting a major scholarly analysis of Tennyson's wider reception in different areas of Europe. It considers reader and critical responses and explores the effect of his poetry upon his contemporaries and later writers, as well as his influence upon illustrators, painters and musicians. The leading international contributors raise questions of translation and publication and of the choices made for this purpose along with the way in which his ideas and style influenced European writing and culture. Tennyson's reputation in Anglophone countries is now assured, following a decline in the years after his death. This volume enables us to chart the changes in Tennyson's European reputation during the later 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

This study uncovers a vital thematic unity within Blake's early work: his far-reaching use of humor. Although often dismissed as a product of his eccentricity, the comic was an essential key to Blake's concept of Vision. With special reference to Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, this book offers new readings of Blake's works, demonstrating how he was influenced by contemporary theatre, verbal and visual satirists and the Shakespearean clown.

"At once erudite and colloquial" (New Yorker), this book provides an accessible introduction to the joys and challenges of poetry In Don't Read Poetry, poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another-and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish-and distinguish among-individual poems. A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingenues and cognoscenti alike.

Frances Harper was renowned in her lifetime not only as an activist who rallied on behalf of blacks, women, and the poor, but as a pioneer of the tradition of 'protest' literature, whose immense popularity did much to develop an audience for poetry in America. This collection of her poems is drawn from ten volumes published between 1854 and 1901. Their main issues are oppression, Christianity, and social and moral reform. Consolidating the oral tradition and the ballad form, and merging dramatic details and imagery with a strong political and racial awareness, Harper's poetry represented a distinctly Afro-American discourse that was to inspire generations of black writers.

Like Paris in the '20s, Berlin in the early thirties was one of the most exciting cities in the world. As the Weimar Republic sputtered to a close and war loomed on the horizon, the city was a magnet for talented writers and artists. It was in this now-vanished time and place that W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood lived, wrote and slept together. Norman Page tells the story of how these years shaped these important writers and, in doing so, illuminates a bygone era.

This book chronicles the rise of goddess worship in the region of Bengal from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Focusing on the goddesses Kali and Uma, McDermott examines lyrical poems written by devotees from Ramprasad Sen (ca. 1718-1775) to Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976).

The Greek View of Poetry details critical theories and the appreciation of poetry by the ancient Greeks. Originally published in 1931, this text deals with a whole range of Greek critics from very early criticism to Longinus and his views on Homer in an attempt to provide a historical view of the importance of poetry to Greek society. This title will be of interest to students of Classics.

In her provocative reassessment of the modern American love lyric, Barbara L. Estrin discovers the connection between the language of love poetry and the rhetoric of hate speech that culminated in the genocides of World War II. The American Love Lyric after Auschwitz and Hiroshima chronicles the return of three major American poets (Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, and Adrienne Rich) to the mid-century catastrophes that reveal unexpected links between poetry and war. Through close readings of individual poems, Estrin counters the presupposition that the lyric remains apolitical. She explores the prevalent influence of the traditional forms that all three poets simultaneously use and revise as they render the love lyric responsive to the cultural agonies of the postwar era.

The hero's descent into the Underworld is not only one of the oldest stories in western literature; it is also one of the most often retold. Why do so many modern poets--British and American, black and white, male and female, from the metropole and from the margins--stage Underworld descents in their works? Through a series of contextualized close readings, this study traces the cultural work performed by modern deployments of the classical narrative. While some poets engage their literary forebears to exorcise anxiety and others use Hell to sharpen their cultural critique, most recent poets, including James Merrill, Derek Walcott, Tony Harrison, and Seamus Heaney, have found the Underworld descent to be a useful framework for addressing the claims of history and politics.

This is a collection of previously published essays on late medieval and early modern literature, designed to act as a companion to "Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology of Writings in English 1375 -1575," edited by Derek Pearsall (1999).

The object of the accompanying anthology is to provide representation of a variety of kinds of prose and verse, including some not traditionally regarded as canonically "literary," and also to trespass beyond the boundaries of the conventional medieval/early modern divide. This new volume provides some of the critical backing for those decisions about the canon and about periodization, and also give evidence of the vigor of opinion and debate in the field in general.

Most of the essays are from the last 20 years, and some are very recent, though space is also found for some earlier classics. The collection pays particular attention to those critics who have had the most powerful recent impact on our reading of the texts of the period: they are selected for their excellence and importance, whether in themselves or as representatives of an influential critical approach, and not for their adherence to any one school of interpretation. They will provide a companion to the texts in the anthology, a commentary and counterpoint to the views expressed in the editor's headnotes and explanatory notes, and a perspective on the best that has been thought and said about the writing of these two extraordinary centuries of creativity, consolidation and seed-sowing.

This revised and updated edition of a Ted Hughes annotated, descriptive bibliography includes a new section recording over 1000 of his manuscripts.

In "The Edge of Modernism, " Walter Kalaidjian explores American poetry on genocide, the Holocaust, and total war as well as on postwar social antagonisms, racial oppression, and domestic violence. By asking what it means for traumatic memory to have agency in the American verse tradition, Kalaidjian creates an original historical account of how American poets became witnesses, often unconsciously, to modern extremity. Combining psychoanalytic theory and cultural studies, this intense, sweeping account of modern poetics analyzes the ways in which literary form gives testimony to the trauma of twentieth-century history.

Through close readings of well-known and less familiar poets--among them Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Edwin Rolfe, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Peter Balakian, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Anne Sexton, and Anthony Hecht--Kalaidjian discerns the latent "edge" of modern trauma as it cuts through the literary representations, themes, and formal techniques of twentieth-century American poetics. In this way, "The Edge of Modernism" advances an innovative and dynamic model of modern periodization.

This book examines descriptions of the natural world in a wide range of Old English poetry. Jennifer Neville describes the physical conditions experienced by the Anglo-Saxons and argues that the poetic descriptions were not a reflection of these conditions but a literary device used by Anglo-Saxons to define more important issues, such as the state of humanity, the creation and maintenance of society, the power of individuals, the relationship between God and creation, and the power of writing to control information.

This set reissues 4 books on Victorian poetry originally published between 1966 and 2003. The volumes focus predominantly on the works of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. This set will be of particular interest to students of English literature.