James Booth reads Philip Larkin's mature poetry in terms of his ambiguous self-image as lonely, anti-social outsider, plighted to his art, and as nine-to-five librarian, sharing the common plight of humanity. Booth's focus is on Larkin's artistry with words, the 'verbal devices' through which this purest of lyric poets celebrates 'the experience. The beauty.' Featuring discussion for the first time of two recently discovered poems by Larkin, this original and exciting new study will be of interest to all students, scholars and enthusiasts of Larkin.

James Merrill and W.H. Auden offers a substantial analysis of the literary and personal relationship between two major twentieth-century poets. As Gwiazda argues, Auden's prominence in the post-World War II American poetry scene as a homosexual poet and critic makes his impact on Merrill particularly noteworthy. Merrill's imaginary recreation of Auden in his occult verse trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover (1982) offers a powerful statement about the dynamics of poetic influence between gay male poets. Combining archival research, textual analysis, and aspects of queer theory, James Merrill and W.H. Auden examines Sandover's implications to the contentious issues of homosexual identity and self-representation.

Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

This book explores Roman love elegy from postcolonial perspectives, arguing that the tropes, conventions, and discourses of the Augustan genre serve to reinforce the imperial identity of its elite, metropolitan audience. Love elegy presents the phenomena and discourses of Roman imperialism-in terms of visual spectacle (the military triumph), literary genre (epic in relation to elegy), material culture (art and luxury goods), and geographic space-as intersecting with ancient norms of gender and sexuality in a way that reinforces Rome's dominance in the Mediterranean. The introductory chapter lays out the postcolonial frame, drawing from the work of Edward Said among other theorists, and situates love elegy in relation to Roman Hellenism and the varied Roman responses to Greece and its cultural influences. Four of the six subsequent chapters focus on the rhetorical ambivalence that characterizes love elegy's treatment of Greek influence: the representation of the domina or mistress as simultaneously a figure for 'captive Greece' and a trope for Roman imperialism; the motif of the elegiac triumph, with varying figures playing the triumphator, as suggestive of Greco-Roman cultural rivalry; Rome's competing visions of an Attic and an Asiatic Hellenism. The second and the final chapter focus on the figures of Osiris and Isis, respectively, as emblematic of Rome's colonialist and ambivalent representation of Egypt, with the conclusion offering a deconstructive reading of elegy's rhetoric of orientalism.

The present edition of the first book of the Epistulae ex Ponto gives a revised text with a new translation, an extended introduction, and the first full-scale commentary of this work in English. The commentary pays particular attention to stylistic questions and examines how the Epistulae exPonto differs from the poet's remaining oeuvre. It demonstrates that Ovid generally adopts a more colloquial and prosaic style (as suits the epistolary form) and that he carefully adjusts the stylistic register to the respective addressees of the letters.

Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) wrote two of the best known shorter poems in English, 'Ode to the West Wind' and 'Ozymandias'; a series of ambitious and challenging long poems including Queen Mab and the 'Lyrical Drama' Prometheus Unbound; A Defence of Poetry and other lucid and provocative political and literary works in prose; sonnets, satires, translations, travel-letters. During and after his lifetime controversy was generated by his poetry, radical politics, atheism, vegetarianism and unorthodox relationships. He was the young Robert Browning's 'Sun-Treader' and Matthew Arnold's 'ineffectual angel'; W.B. Yeats said that Shelley 'shaped my life' and F.R. Leavis discouraged people from reading him. The dictionary covers all these areas of interest, as well as Shelley's travels and homes in Britain and Europe, his important personal and literary relationships with Mary Shelley, Byron, Godwin, Keats, Peacock, Coleridge, Wordsworth, his vast reading, European and American reception, representations in fiction, drama, film and portraits, and the sources, publication history, reviews and illustrations of his work.

This text examines the male Romantics' versions of poetic authority in theory and practice in the context of their involvement in the political debates of Regency Britain and argues that their response to Burke's gendered discourse about power effected radical changes in the definitions of masculinity and femininity. It portrays their influence on each other as a series of unstable struggles and alliances in which the formulation of an authoritative masculinity was a political as well as an aesthetic issue. The author investigates the writers' portrayals of women and their collaborations with women writers and throws new light on their nature poetry by relating it to their reactions to the sexual and political scandals of the Regency.

Available as both a portable paperback volume and an enhanced digital edition, this complete collection of The Norton Chaucer: Canterbury Tales is meticulously glossed and annotated. With access to the ground-breaking Reading Chaucer Tutorial included in every new copy, this volume delivers unmatched support and value.

A major aim of this study is to make Peter Burger's way of thinking accessible in English by advancing the existing critical discourse that accompanies the poetry of Keats. Applying Burger's aesthetic categories in an interpretation of the poetry permits the claim that Keats is one poet who drives the unique role of poetry to the point of seeing it as an end in itself, but also came to understand the need to break down the distance between poetry and society, art and politics.

This book explores key texts - Howards End , The Rainbow , and the poetry of Owen, Sassoon and Edward Thomas - to show the mingled continuation and rejection of convention as their characteristic achievement, exploring features often seen as failures. It also discusses the writing's increasing concern with the inadequacies of language, seeing it within the frame of contemporary society and deconstructive theory, and attempting to locate them in relation to high Modernism.

This book offers an exciting reassessment of Keats with particular emphasis on gender identity and sexuality. Traditionally, Keats has been more readily associated with the 'feminine' than any other canonical male English poet. This feminization was always likely, given his tragically early death and the mythologizing which took place soon after. In contrast, John Whale explores Keats's writings from the perspective of masculinity and gender by placing them in the context of contemporary friendship groupings and coterie relationships. Whale addresses all the major poems and gives due prominence to the letters. In so doing, he offers a new understanding of Keats's exploration of poetry, gender and desire, and provides an extended analysis of Keats's quest for poetic fame in the face of the often conflicting forces of love and sexuality. Clear, concise and insightful, this is an essential guide to one of the best-known Romantic poets.

Presenting a new way of reading that helps us discern some previously unnoticed or unnoticeable features of Asian diaspora poetry, this volume highlights how poetry plays a significant role in mediating and defining cross-cultural and transnational positions.

Asian diaspora poetry in North America is a rich body of poetic works that, not only provide valuable material for us to understand the lives and experiences of Asian diasporas, but present us with an opportunity to examine some of the most important issues in current literary and cultural studies.

As a mode of writing across cultural and national borders, these poetic works challenge us to reconsider the assumptions and meanings of identity, nation, home and place in a broad cross-cultural context. In recent postcolonial studies, diaspora has been conceived not only as a process of migration in which people crossed and traversed the borders of different countries, but also as a double relationship between different cultural origins.

With all its complexity and ambiguity associated with the experience of multi-cultural mediation, diaspora, as both a process and a relationship, suggests an act of constant repositioning in confluent streams that accommodate to multiple cultural traditions. By examining how Asian diaspora poets maintain and represent their cultural differences in North America, we are able to seek new perspectives for understanding and analyzing the intrinsic values of Asian cultures that survive and develop persistently in North American societies.

Statutes of Liberty (1993) was the first book on The New York School of Poets, and offers the definitive critical account of its key figures: John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler. This second edition contains up-to-date material on the group and its growing influence on postmodern poetics. A new postscript focuses on the work of Ashbery, currently the most esteemed American poet since Wallace Stevens, and his profile output in the 1990s, including his two hundred page epic poem Flow Chart.

Once celebrated as "the English Sappho," Mary Robinson was a major figure in British Romanticism. This volume offers a comprehensive study of Robinson's achievement as a poet, professional writer, formative influence on the Romantic movement, and a participant in the literary, political, and social scene of the late 1700s.

Salvaging Spenser is a major new work of literary revision which places Edmund Spenser's corpus, from The Shepheardes Calender to A View of the Present State of Ireland, within an elaborate cultural and political context. The author refuses to engage in the sterile opposition between apology and attack that has marred studies of Spenser and Ireland, seeking neither to savage nor to save, but rather, in a project of critical recovery, to salvage Spenser from the wreckage of Irish history.

A poet of the seventeenth century, Milton with his future gaze may prove to be (singularly among the triumvirate of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton) the poet "for" the new millennium--the poet "for" the twenty-first century. Milton will be so to the extent that through him we see the upheavals in the humanities as deriving not from a revision of the canon but rather, as Bill Readings insists in "The University in Ruins, " from "a crisis in the "function" of the canon" and, then, to the extent that Milton shocks us into the recognition that poets sometimes deliver messages at odds with those with which they are credited.

The British Romantic poets were among the first to realize the centrality of the "Divine Comedy" for the evolution of the European epic. This study explores the significance of Dante for Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and William Blake. What was their idea of Dante? Why did they feel the need to approach his Christian epic on the afterlife? This study aims to answer these questions by focusing on the three poets' preoccupation with form and language.

One of America's most celebrated poets, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her lifetime. When a slim volume of her poems emerged on the American scene in 1890, her work created shockwaves that have not subsided yet. Famously precise and sparse, Emily Dickinson's poetry is often described as philosophical, both because her poetry grapples with philosophical topics like death, spirituality, and the darkening operations of the mind, and because she approaches those topics in a characteristically philosophical manner: analyzing and extrapolating from close observation, exploring alternatives, and connecting thoughts into cumulative demonstrations. But unlike Lucretius or Pope, she cannot be accused of producing versified treatises. Many of her poems are unsettling in their lack of conclusion; their disparate insights often stand in conflict; and her logic turns crucially on imagery, juxtaposition, assonance, slant rhyme, and punctuation. The six chapters of this volume collectively argue that Dickinson is an epistemically ambitious poet, who explores fundamental questions by advancing arguments that are designed to convince. Dickinson exemplifies abstract ideas in tangible form and habituates readers into productive trains of thought-she doesn't just make philosophical claims, but demonstrates how poetry can make a distinct contribution to philosophy. All essays in this volume, drawn from both philosophers and literary theorists, serve as a counterpoint to recent critical work, which has emphasized Dickinson's anguished uncertainty, her nonconventional style, and the unsettled status of her manuscripts. On the view that emerges here, knowing is like cleaning, mending, and lacemakingL a form of hard, ongoing work, but one for which poetry is a powerful, perhaps indispensable, tool.

The first complete edition of the works of Robert Browning with variant readings and annotations contains: 1. The entire contents of the first editions of Browning's work; 2. All prefaces and dedications which Browning wrote for his own works and for those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and others; 3. The two prose essays: The Essay on Chatterton and The Essay on Shelley; 4. The front matter and tables of contents of each of the collected editions (1849, 1863, 1865, 1868, 1888-1889) which Browning himself saw through the press; 5 Poems by Browning published during his lifetime but not collected by him; 9. Poems not published during Browning's lifetime which have come to light since his death; 7. John Forster's Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford to which Browning contributed significantly, though to what precise extent has not been determined. The edition provides a full apparatus, including variant readings and annotations.

In this volume, thirteen essays examine the full breadth and variety of Coleridge's afterlives. Topics include philosophy, gender, imagination, American literature, South Asian literature, aesthetics, narrative, and poetry. It offers new research to the scholar, maps complex territory, and spans traditional period barriers in literary studies.

Iseult Gonne, daughter of Maud Gonne and the French politician and journalist Lucien Millevoye, attracted many admirers - among them distinguished authors such as W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Arthur Symms, Lennox Robinson, Francis Stuart and Liam O'Flaherty. Yeats proposed marriage to her, Ezra Pound had a secret, passionate love affair with her and she married Francis Stuart. This book contains her hitherto unpublished letters to Yeats and Pound, edited and annotated by Anna MacBride White (Maud Gonne's granddaughter), Christina Bridgwater (Iseult's granddaughter) and A. Norman Jeffares, the distinguished Yeats scholar.