?Among the many national poets of historical Persia, Ferdowsi is perhaps the greatest...In this superb translation of the epic, the Western reader would not fail to discern clear equivalents of chapters in Genesis, The Odyssey, Paradise Lost or the Canterbury Tales.? Islamic Review
The Shah-nama is the national epic poem of Persia. Written in the tenth century it contains the country's myths, legends and historic reminiscences. This edition makes available a valuable prose translation selecting the most representative parts of the original including the stories of Rustum, the giant hero and his son Sohrab.

Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America explores nineteenth-century poetry as it addresses and engages in the major concerns of American cultural life. Focusing on gender, biblical politics, Revolutionary discourses and racial, sectional, and religious identities, this book reveals how these issues contended and negotiated with each other in the shaping of a pluralist democratic polity. Nineteenth-century American poetry, far from being the self-reflective art object of twentieth-century aesthetic theory, offered a rhetorical arena in which civic, economic, and religious trends intersected with each other in mutual definition and investigation. With a deft hand, Shira Wolosky demonstrates the ways in which poetry was a core impulse in the formation of American identity and cultural definition.

This collection makes a critical and creative intervention into ongoing debates about the relationship between poetry and autobiography. Drawing on recent theories of life writing, the essays in the first part of this volume provide new analyses of works by a range of poets, dating from the early modern period to the present day. Exploring the autobiographical resonances of poems by Martha Moulsworth, Mina Loy, Anne Sexton, Joe Brainard, Edward Kamau Braithwaite, and Gwyneth Lewis, the authors here examine the extent to which discourses of truth and authenticity have been implicated in traditional interpretations of lyric poetry. In doing so, they endeavour to illuminate the complex intersections -- and divergences -- of poetry and autobiography, asking what these forms might learn from each other about issues of shared concern, from questions of identity and textuality to those of reference and audience. The creative reflections which form the second part of the collection develop and respond to these questions in various suggestive and original ways; here poetry and prose are used in order to test the relationship between poetry and life writing and to explore issues of memory, time, place, subjectivity and voice. This book was published as a special issue of Life Writing.

First published in 1979, this is a very welcome reissue of Kathleen Raine's seminal study of William Blake - England's only prophet. He challenged with extraordinary vigour the premises which now underline much of Western civilization, hitting hard at the ideas of a naive materialist philosophy which, even in his own day, was already eating at the roots of English national life. In his insistence that ?mental things are alone real?, Blake was ahead of his time. Materialist views are now challenged from various quarters; the depth psychologies of Freud and Jung, the study of Far Easter religion and philosophy, the reappraisal of myth and folk lore, the wealth of psychical research have all prepared the way for an understanding of Blake's thought. We are ready to acknowledge that in attacking ?the sickness of Albion? Blake penetrated to the inner worlds of man and explored them in a way that is quite unique.

Dr Raine, who has made a long study of Blake's sources, presents him as a lonely powerful genius who stands within the spiritual tradition of Sophia Perennis, ?the Everlasting Gospel?. From the standpoint of this great human Norm, our immediate past described by W.B. Yeats as ?the three provincial centuries?, is a tragic deviation; catastrophic, as Blake believed, in its spiritual and material consequences. Only now do we possess the necessary knowledge to understand William Blake and the ever-growing number of people who turn to him surely justifies his faith in the eternal truths he strove to communicate.

First published in 1967, this is a study which tackles the central problem of meaning, within Ezra Pound's The Cantos. It deals with the question of important critical issues, as well as of interpretation and understanding. Students of modern poetry will derive great benefit from this vigorous and lucid analysis of Pound's masterpiece. Noel Stock's finding is radical: that The Cantos is not a really a poem at all, but rather notes towards a poem. It is a collection of fragments of varying quality - some of extraordinary power and beauty - but in no sense formed into a work of art.

Les Murray is amongst the most gifted poets writing today, his multi-faceted talents have received high praise both in his native Australia and beyond. But he has also proved a controversial figure, whose poetry strays across the boundaries of political and cultural debate. The only full critical study of Murray's work available, Steven Matthews provides a complete picture of his career to date, from its early parables of national emergence to the working man's epic encounter with the major events of the twentieth century, Fredy Neptune. Provides detailed readings of key poems, as well as literary and cultural contexts for the rapid shifts in style and subject matter Murray has made from collection to collection. Gives an overview of Murray's place within Australian literature and national thought. -- .

Romantic Visualities offers a culturally informed understanding of the literary significance of landscape in the Romantic period. Labbe argues that the Romantic period associated the prospect view with the masculine ideal, simultaneously fashioning the detailed point of view as feminised. An interdisciplinary study, it discusses the cultural construction of gender as defined through landscape viewing, and investigates property law, aesthetic tracts, conduct books, travel narratives, artistic theory, and the work of Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Ann Francis, Dorothy Wordsworth and others.

Verse Drama in England, 1900-2015 provides a critical and historical exploration of a tradition of modern dramatic creativity that has received very little scholarly attention. Exploring the emergence of a distinctly modern verse drama at the turn of the century and its development into the twenty-first, it counters common assumptions that the form is a marginal, fundamentally outdated curiosity. Through an examination of the extensive and diverse engagement of literary and theatrical writers, directors and musicians, Irene Morra identifies in modern verse drama a consistent and often prominent attempt to expand upon, revitalize, and redefine the contemporary English stage. Dramatists discussed include Stephen Phillips, Gordon Bottomley, John Masefield, James Elroy Flecker, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Ronald Duncan, Christopher Fry, John Arden, Anne Ridler, Tony Harrison, Steven Berkoff, Caryl Churchill, and Mike Bartlett. The book explores the negotiation of these dramatists with the changing position of verse drama in relation to constructions of national and communal audience, aesthetic challenge, and dramatic heritage. Key to the study is the self-conscious positioning of many of these dramatists in relation to an assumed mainstream tradition - and the various critical responses that that positioning has provoked. The study advocates for a scholarly revaluation of what must be identified as an influential and overlooked tradition of aesthetic challenge and creativity.

This book re-examines cultural, social, geographical and philosophical representations of Victorian London by looking at the transformations in urban life produced by the rise and development of urban mass-transport. It also radically re-addresses the questions of epistemology and gender in the Victorian metropolis by mapping the epistemology of the passenger. Vadillo focuses on the lyric urban writings of Amy Levy, Alice Meynell, 'Graham R. Tomson' (Rosamund Marriott Watson) and 'Michael Field' (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper). Shortlisted for the ESSE Book Prize

In this volume, Eobanus Hessus turns from passionate Erasmian into staunch defender of Luther, only to find himself caught in the no-man's-land between the two titans. Under Erasmus' spell, he writes "Itinerary of My Journey to Erasmus," "On the Restoration of Studies at Erfurt," epigrams against Edward Lee, and "Short Preface to the 'Enchiridion.'" Changing course in 1521, he publishes "Elegies in Praise and Defense of Luther" and "Letter of the Afflicted Church to Luther." Thereafter, amid tumults and academic collapse, he battles the radical preachers in "Some Letters of Illustrious Men Concerning the More Humane Studies" and "Three Dialogues." Two elegies serve as intermezzos: a "Consolation" to the imprisoned William of Brunswick and a patriotic "Invective" against Johannes Dantiscus.

A provocative approach to a famous figure in English poetry and to the relationship of literature to biography - both the poet's and the critic's own. Gary Waller, known for accessibly combining contemporary literary and cultural theory with Renaissance poetry, provides an intriguing overview of the period's most praised poet. Examining Spenser's career in terms of the material conditions of his poetry's production - factors of race, gender, class, agency - and the 'places' of its production - court, church, nation, colony - he also writes movingly of the 'place' the biographer occupies in the construction of a 'literary life'. The book includes chapters on Spenser's poetry and career, including an original account of the gender politics of his work and his difficult position between Ireland and England, the 'homes' about which he held increasingly painful feelings.

Philip Larkin is recognised as one of the most important writers to have emerged in Britain since the Second World War. First published in 1982, Andrew Motiona (TM)s study begins with an account of Larkina (TM)s life and literary background and discusses his literary relationship with Hardy and Yeats and his association with the Movement. He analyses Larkina (TM)s two novels and assesses his three mature collections. Throughout the book much reference is made to uncollected reviews and articles and occasionally to unpublished manuscripts. Rather than developing the familiar line on Larkin as an empirical and melancholy writer, Andrew Motion explores the Symbolist and transcendent element in his work, and emphasises its range and variety.

Marriage features to a greater or lesser extent in virtually every play Shakespeare wrote - as the festive end of comedy, as the link across the cycles of the history plays, as a marker of the difference between his own society and that depicted in the Roman plays, and, all too often, as the starting-point for the tragedies. Situating his representations of marriage firmly within the ideologies and practices of Renaissance culture, Lisa Hopkins argues that Shakespeare anatomises marriage much as he does kingship, and finds it similarly indispensable to the underpinning of society, however problematic it may be as a guarantor of personal happiness.

The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth Century American Literature offers a cutting-edge assessment of the period's literature, providing readers with practical insights and proactive strategies for exploring novels, poems, and other literary creations.

Though poets have always written about cities, the commonest critical categories (pastoral poetry, nature poetry, Romantic poetry, Georgian poetry, etc.) have usually stressed the rural, so that poetry can seem irrelevant to a predominantly urban populati. Explores a range of contemporary poets who visit the 'mean streets' of the contemporary urban scene, seeking the often cacophonous music of what happens here. Poets discussed include: Ken Smith, Iain Sinclair, Roy Fisher, Edwin Morgan, Sean O'Brien, Ciaran Carson, Peter Reading, Matt Simpson, Douglas Houston, Deryn Rees-Jones, Denise Riley, Ken Edwards, Levi Tafari, Aidan Hun, and Robert Hampson. Approaches contemporary poetry within a broad spectrum of personal, social, literary, and cultural concerns. Includes 'loco-specific' chapters, on cities including Hull, Liverpool, London, and Birmingham, with an additional chapter on 'post-industrial' cities such as Belfast, Glasgow and Dundee. -- .

Ted Hughes is widely regarded as a major figure in twentieth-century poetry, but the impact of Hughes's class background on his work has received little attention. This is the first full length study to take the measure of the importance of class in Hughes. It presents a radically new version of Hughes that challenges the image of Hughes as primarily a nature poet, as well as the image of the Tory Laureate. The controversy over 'natural' violence in Hughes's early poems, Hughes's relationship with Seamus Heaney, the Laureateship, and Hughes's revisiting of his relationship with Sylvia Plath in Birthday Letters "(1998), are reconsidered in terms of Hughes's class background. Drawing on the thinking of cultural theorists such as Slavoj i ek, Terry Eagleton, and Julia Kristeva, the book presents new political readings of familiar Hughes poems, alongside consideration of posthumously collected poems and letters, to reveal a surprising picture of a profoundly class-conscious poet.

This bibliography provides a comprehensive record of verse drama in modern literature. The volume begins with an introduction, which discusses the significance of verse drama in modern theater, and which overviews the history and intent of modern verse drama. The bibliography that follows provides entries for more than 500 plays written in verse or in verse and prose between 1935 and 1992. Included are works by renowned playwrights such as T.S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, and John Arden, as well as plays by lesser-known dramatists. The plays are organized alphabetically by the name of the author. Included are anthologies of plays as well. Each entry is accompanied by an annotation that succinctly overviews the major themes and significance of the work. Title and subject index conclude the reference.

What do we mean by 'voice' in poetry? In this work, David Nowell Smith teases out the diverse meanings of 'voice', from a poem's soundworld to the rhetorical gestures through which poems speak to us, in order to embark on a philosophical exploration of the concept of voice itself.

Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts is the first book-length study that examines Celan's impact on visual culture. Exploring poetry's relation to film, painting and architecture, this study tracks the transformation of Celan in postwar German culture and shows the extent to which his poetics accompany the country's memory politics after the Holocaust. The book posits a new theoretical model of the Holocaustal uncanny -evolving out of a crossing between Celan, Freud, Heidegger and Levinas - that provides a map for entering other modes of Holocaust representations. After probing Celan's critique of the uncanny in Heidegger, this study shifts to the translation of Celan's uncanny poetics in Resnais' film Night and Fog, Kiefer's art and Libeskind's architecture.

A survey of poetry from Northern Ireland, the Republic, Britain and the USA. The five chapters of the book cover the 1950s, 1960s, the early troubles period to 1976, the 1980s and 1990s. Each poet is placed firmly within his or her historical and social contexts, with an emphasis on the response to the processes of modernisation, the representation of violence, poetic form and gender. While the distinctiveness of Northern and Southern poetries is respected, Irish poets are seen to be engaged in a continual process of cross-border exchange. Over 30 individual poets are dealt with, and in each case detailed readings of individual poems are given along with contextual material. While the major critical issues are addressed the book is primarily concerned to break with the small canon of texts and poets which tends to dominate discussions of the subject, and emphasizes a heterogeneity and diversity of achievement. It avoids the imposition of a single interpretation on a diverse body of writing and makes the case for a wider appraisal of Irish poetry which considers international and mainstream influences. It concludes with a discussion of poetry of the diaspora at a time of the fragile Northern Ireland ceasefire and the "Celtic Tiger" phenomenon in the Republic.

Benjamin Zephaniah, who has travelled the world for his art and his humanitarianism, now tells the one story that encompasses it all: the story of his life. In the early 1980s when punks and Rastas were on the streets protesting about unemployment, homelessness and the National Front, Benjamin's poetry could be heard at demonstrations, outside police stations and on the dance floor. His mission was to take poetry everywhere, and to popularise it by reaching people who didn't read books. His poetry was political, musical, radical and relevant. By the early 1990s, Benjamin had performed on every continent in the world (a feat which he achieved in only one year) and he hasn't stopped performing and touring since. Nelson Mandela, after hearing Benjamin's tribute to him while he was in prison, requested an introduction to the poet that grew into a lifelong relationship, inspiring Benjamin's work with children in South Africa. Benjamin would also go on to be the first artist to record with The Wailers after the death of Bob Marley in a musical tribute to Nelson Mandela. The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah is a truly extraordinary life story which celebrates the power of poetry and the importance of pushing boundaries with the arts.

Ogden Nash was a rare poet. He celebrated the ordinary with delight and curiosity: husbands and wives at work, children at play, a society in motion. He studied popular culture with a penetrating eye and wrote about America, its icons, habits, and affectations with humor and levity. He struggled with comparisons to serious poets, those heroes of the canon who abandoned the rhyme and meter that Nash found crucial to his style of writing. His witty, insightful, and graceful vignettes captured those moments in life that defy heavy-handed treatment. Nash did not live out the stereotype of the aloof poet-recluse. In addition to his writing, Nash pursued publishing, screenwriting, and a rigorous lecture circuit. This self-styled poet of wide appeal appeared in newspapers and magazines found in homes across the country, accessible publications such as Life, The New Yorker, Cosmopolitan, Sports Illustrated, Reader s Digest, and McCall s. At a time when children s literature meant Winnie-the-Pooh, Nash produced verses for and about young people that amused, educated, and more important, didn t pander or lecture. These poems and collections, including Custard the Dragon, The New Nutcracker Suite and Other Innocent Verses, A Boy Is a Boy, and Girls Are Silly, were classics of the genre. Nash left behind an invaluable body of work: charming, clever, and utterly unique."