Explores the process involved in reading William Blake's poems. The poems include on the same pages, verbal and visual texts that often seem to be at odds with one another or even, at times, to be entirely unrelated. Because reading verbal and visual texts involves different asthetic assumptions and operations, Blake's texts make different demands on their readers which further complicates the reading activity. The author attempts to outline some of the ways in which the intellectual and imaginative transaction proceeds between author and reader via the medium of the illuminated text as a physical artifact.

Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson form an engaging triad of poets who, considered together, enrich the poetics of each other; the works of the three poets address language, birth, and scientific aspects of culture in ways that frame new perceptions of sex roles. Exacerbating 19th-century American expectations for sexually-constructed experience, they employ tactics that disrupt patriarchal signification. The first book to group these three poets together, this volume examines the daring language experiments in which they engage. It explores their use of pseduoscientific and scientific studies of alchemy, hydropathy, and botany to inform their understanding of language and birth and to discover expressions that challenge expectations for 19th-century poetry.

The rising awareness of women's rights, which concurred with the antebellum call for a new American literature, also informed the emerging sense of the feminine that prompts the poets to use the maternal in their poetry. While they do not address the woman question of the 19th century in concrete ways, they nonetheless relied upon the female experience of birthing to create a new relationship with language and to question the nature of signification.

This collection maps the Beat Generation movement, exploring American Beat writers alongside parallel movements in other countries that shared a critique of global capitalism. Ranging from the immediate post-World War II period and continuing into the 1990s, the essays illustrate Beat participation in the global circulation of a poetics of dissent.

Bringing a fresh approach to the field, this study shows that poems by women do not always subvert the mainstream, the media, and the marketplace. With explorations of both Hollywood films, household advertising, children's books, mass magazines, and tabloid journalism as well as the poetry of H.D., Stevie Smith, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Ai, and Carol Ann Duffy, Marsha Bryant assesses the counterintuitive innovations that these poets fashion through popular culture. Bridging feminist and cultural studies, this book analyzes the ways in which British and American women poets often operate as cultural insiders, consuming music, movies, and magazines through poems that do not always conform to appropriation or critique.

Tackling topics such as globalization and political activism, this book traces engaged poetics in 20th century American poetry. Spahr provides a comprehensive view of activist poetry, starting with the Great Depression and the Harlem Renaissance and moving to the Beats and contemporary writers such as Amiri Baraka and Mark Nowak.

Contrary to the monolithic impression left by postcolonial theories of Orientalism, the book makes the case that Orientals did not exist solely to be gazed at. Hermes shows that there was no shortage of medieval Muslims who cast curious eyes towards the European Other and that more than a handful of them were interested in Europe.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Opus Maximum, written in the early 1820s and first published in 2002, is a challenge to every scholar who has encountered it. Sublime Coleridge offers an entry point to this important text of British Romanticism, with a reader's guide and background information. Murray J. Evans introduces each major theme of the Opus Maximum--the Will, divine ideas, human subjectivity, and the Trinity--and shows their importance in explaining Coleridge's ideas about religion, psychology, and the sublime.

A record of a teacher's lifelong love affair with the beauty, wit, and pro fundity of Paradise Lost, celebrating John Milton's un-doctrinal, complex, and therefore deeply satisfying perception of the human condition. After surveying Milton's recurrent struggle as a reconciler of conflicting ide als, this Primer undertakes a book-by-book reading of Paradise Lost, re viewing key features of Milton's "various style," and why we treasure that style. Cavanagh constantly revisits Milton the singer and maker, and the artistic problems he faced in writing this almost impossible poem. This book is emphatically for first-time readers of Milton, with little or no prior exposure, but with ambition to encounter challenging poetry. These are readers who tell you they "have always been meaning to read Paradise Lost," who seek to enjoy the epic without being overwhelmed by its daunting learning and expansive frame of reference. Avoiding the narrowly specialized focus of most Milton scholarship, Cavanagh deals forthrightly with issues that recur across generations of readers, gather ing selected voices-from scholars and poets alike-from 1674 through the present. Lively and jargon-free, this Primer makes Paradise Lost accessible and fresh, offering a credible beginning to what is a great intellectual and aesthetic adventure.

The funeral elegy is in some ways the quintessential English Renaissance genre. This book demonstrates how the hospitality of elegy to different styles, genres and modes, alongside the primary formal obligation to fit the poem decorously to the subject, gave a special value to ingenuity. The elegist, like the sonneteer, had to prove (or at least protest) that the ingenuity was grounded in the subject and not merely indulged in as a species of self-advertisement or display. By the time Milton came to write "Lycidas", the vernacular funeral elegy had developed into a form - or rather a variety of possible forms - in which any educated person could perform. For younger poets the elegy eventually constituted a kind of laboratory in which they could put into notice what they had learned about composition. It also became, during the period covered in this study, a means of learning about decorum, of investigating, exploring, analyzing, representing, anatomizing social (and political) relationships on the occasion of the subject's death. "Melodious Tears" charts the history of the elegy from the time in the mid-16th century when it was exclusively the province of professional writers, the

Ezra Pound belatedly conceded that T.S.Eliot "was the true Dantescan voice" of the modern world. This is the first study to deal with this assertion and the relationship between the two poets. It attempts to show how Dante's total vision impinges on Eliot's craft and thought. Eliot's indebtedness to his Italian master, whose poetry he deemed "as the most persistent and deepest influence" upon his own verse, manifests itself in a variety of literary strategies, including imitation, parody, citation and allusion. At the same time Eliot's debt transcends the literary to embrace Dante's total vision, or his philosophy, theology and politics. Various aspects of Eliot's recourse to Dante's craft and thought may appear in a new light - his recurring fascination with Ulysses in "Inferno XXVI" and especially with Arnaut Daniel in "Purgatorio XXVI"; the exodus motif as it informs "The Waste Land", "The Hollow Men" and "Ash Wednesday"; the metaphor of Dante's book of memory as it applies to Eliot's work; the notion of order in its ethical, aesthetic and political dimensions. Finally, light is shed on some of the reasons why Eliot's Dante ultimately differs radically from that of the other mod

Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens was a cosmopolitan Dutch physician and Latin poet of the eighteenth century. A Catholic, he was in many ways an outsider on his own turf, the peat country of Protestant Groningen, and looked to Voltaire's Paris, as much as Ovid, in exile, had looked to Rome. An indefatigable traveller and networker, Heerkens mixed freely with philosophers, physicians, churchmen, and antiquarians. This book reconstructs his Latin works and networks, and reveals in the process a virtually unexplored corner of eighteenth-century culture, the 'Latin Enlightenment'.

This is an original, full length biography of Britain's first twentieth-century black feminist - Una Marson - poet, playwright, and social activist and BBC broadcaster. Una Marson is recognised today as the first major woman poet of the Caribbean and as a significant forerunner of contemporary black writers; her story throws light on the problems facing politicised black artists. In challenging definitions of 'race' and 'gender' in her political and creative work, she forged a valiant path for later black feminists. Her enormous social and cultural contributions to the Caribbean and Britain have, until now, remained hidden in archives and memoirs around the world. Based on extensive research and oral testimony, this biography embraces postcolonial realities and promise, and is a major contribution to British cultural history. -- .

The most influential East-West artistic, cultural, and literary exchange that has taken place in modern and postmodern times was the reading and writing of haiku. Richard Wright wrote over four thousand haiku, Alice Walker's work reflects her affinity for Zen philosophy, and Ishmael Reed's work includes a discussion of Eastern thought. Here, esteemed contributors investigate the impact of Eastern philosophy and religion on African American writers from Richard Wright to Ralph Ellison to Ishmael Reed and Charles Johnson, offering a fresh field of literary inquiry.

Explores the representation of emotions as psychological concepts and cultural constructs in Geoffrey Chaucer's narrative poetry. McTaggart argues that Chaucer's main works including The Canterbury Tales are united thematically in their positive view of guilt and in their anxiety about the desire for sacrifice and vengeance that shame can provoke.

Paradise Dislocated offers a radical rereading of William Morris's neglected masterpiece, The Earthly Paradise. While most critics have seen this poem as the antithesis of the radical socialist politics that Morris embraced later in his career, or, at best, as an awkward prelude to that later development, Jeffrey Skoblow proposes that The Earthly Paradise is in fact central to Morris's political vision-indeed, it is the most radical manifestation of that vision. Paradise Dislocated explores the problematic relations between critical thought, art, utopian aspirations, and dystopian realities. It proposes a revaluation of Morris's poem and of his career as a whole, as well as a judgement upon the possibilities (and impossibilities) of imaginative and cultural criticism at Morris's moment-and at our own.

This book (comprising four lectures presented at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1985) is concerned with the function and status of poetry in the twentieth century, and is particularly concerned to contrast attitudes in Britain and America with those in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Beginning with the function of poetry today, Professor Gifford goes on to consider the nature and validity of 'poetic witness', the problem of the poet's solitude and his relation to the community, and finally the question of how far the 'international code' of poetry can be understood by those who care for it seriously in their own language. The author, who has published on many aspects of twentieth-century poetry, has attempted an 'apology for poetry' in an age which needs, but tends to ignore, this art formerly at the centre of European civilization. Amongst the poets discussed are Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Emily Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Cavafy and Seferis.

This book is an analysis of the sonnet in the English Renaissance. It especially traces the relations between Shakespeare's sonnets and the ways in which other writers use the form. It looks at how the poetry fits into the historical situation at the time, with regard to images of the family and of women. Its explorationi of these issues is informed by much recent work in critical theory, which it tries to make as accessible as possible.

After a sleepless night spent longing for his absent wife Sita, Rama, god-prince and future king, surveyed his army camps on a clear autumn morning and spied a white goose playing in a pond of lotus flowers. Seeing this radiant creature who so resembled his lost beloved, he began to plead with the bird to send her a message of love and fierce revenge. This is the setting of the Hamsasandesa ("A Message for the Goose"), a sandesa or "messenger poem" by the medieval saint-poet and philosopher Vedantedesika, a seminal figure for the Srivaisnava religious community of Tamil Nadu, South India, and a master poet in Sanskrit and Tamil. In The Flight of Love, Steven P. Hopkins situates Vedantedesika's Sanskrit sandesa within the wider comparative context of South Indian and Sri Lankan literatures. He traces the significance of messenger poetry in the construction of sacred landscapes in pre-modern South Asia and explores the ways the piece re-envisions the pan-Indian story of Rama and Sita, rooting his protagonists in a turbulent emotional world where separation, overwhelming desire, and anticipated bliss, are written into the living particularized bodies of lover and beloved, in the "messenger" goose and in the landscapes surrounding them. Hopkins's translation of the Hamsasandesa into fluid American English verse is framed by a comparative introduction, including an extended essay on translation, detailed linguistic notes, and an expanded thematic commentary that weaves together traditional religious interpretations of the poem with themes of contemporary literary relevance. Equally the work of a scholar and a poet, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian studies, comparative religion, and Indian literatures.

Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory, the first book-length treatment of the character, examines the Pardoner in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales from the perspective of both medieval and twentieth-century theories of sex, gender, and erotic practice. Sturges argues for a discontinuous, fragmentary reading of this character and his tale that is genuinely both premodern and postmodern. Drawing on theorists ranging from St. Augustine and Alain de Lille to Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sturges approaches the Pardoner as a representative of the construction of historical--and sexual--identities in a variety of historically specific discourses, and argues that medieval understandings of gender remain sedimented in postmodern discourse.

Introducing students to the full range of critical approachesto the poetry of the period, Perspectives on World War I Poetry is an authoritative and accessible guide to the extraordinary variety of international poetic responses to the Great War of 1914-18. Each chapter covers one or more major poets, and guides the reader through close readings of poems from a full range of theoretical perspectives, including: . Classical . Formalist . Psychoanalytic . Marxist . Structuralist . Reader-response . New Historicist . Feminist Including the full text of each poem discussed and poetry from British, North American and Commonwealth writers, the book explores the work of such poets as: Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, Alys Fane Trotter, Eva Dobell, Charlotte Mew, John McCrae, Edward Thomas, Eleanor Farjeon, Margaret Sackville, Sara Teasdale, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Teresa Hooley, Isaac Rosenberg, Leon Gellert, Marian Allen, Vera Brittain, Margaret Postgate Cole, Wilfred Owen, E.E. Cummings and David Jones.

This volume on Blake follows the writer's life and combines biography and critical analysis. Covering Blake's early career, his major works and his work as a visual artist, this new study will be a must for all Blake scholars and enthusiasts. Recent discoveries concerning Blake's forebears and their religion make this new study additionally timely.

"Shelley's German Afterlives "traces the German reception of P.B. Shelley over a time-span of nearly 200 years, considering material as diverse as anthologies, journals, biographies, poetic imitations, translations. If German readers of the 1830s and 1840s were initially fascinated by Shelley's life and death, interest in the lyrical and the political Shelley set in soon, too. "Men of England" became the model for one of the most popular German working class poems by Herwegh. In the context of the "fin de siecle" and of expressionism, Shelley's Faustian characters--Cenci and Prometheus--received acclaim.