In Echo and Critique, Florian Gargaillo skillfully charts the ways that poets have responded to the cliches of public speech from the start of the Second World War to the present. Beginning around 1939, many public intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic lamented that the political lexicon had become saturated with bureaucratic stock phrases such as "the fight for freedom," "revenue enhancement," and "service the target," designed for the mass media and used to euphemize, obfuscate, and evade. Instead of ridding their writing of such language, many poets parroted these tropes as a means of exploring the implications of such expressions, weighing their effects, and identifying the realities they distort and suppress. With its attentiveness to linguistic particulars, poetry proved especially well-suited to this innovative mode of close listening and intertextual commentary. At the same time, postwar poets recognized their own susceptibility to dead language, so that co-opting political cliches obliged them to scrutinize their writing and accept the inevitability of cant while simultaneously pushing against it. This innovative study blends close readings with historical context as it traces the development of echo and critique in the work of seven poets who expertly deployed the method throughout their careers: W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Robert Lowell, Josephine Miles, and Seamus Heaney. Gargaillo's analysis reveals that poetry can encourage us to listen diligently and critically to the insincerity ubiquitous in public discourse.

"I try to write something every day even though I am not writing poetry, just to get myself in touch with language."-Edwin Morgan Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) is one of the giants of modern literature. Scotland's national poet from 2004 to his death, throughout his long life he produced an astonishing variety of work, from the playful to the profound. Edwin Morgan: In Touch With Language presents previously uncollected prose - journalism, book and theatre reviews, scholarly essays and lectures, drama and radio scripts, forewords and afterwords - all carefully moulded to the needs of differing audiences. Morgan's writing fizzes with clarity and verve: the topics range from Gilgamesh to Ginsberg, from cybernetics to sexualities, from international literatures to the changing face of his home city of Glasgow. Everyone will find surprises and delights in this new collection.

Humor in recent American poetry has been largely dismissed or ignored by scholars, due in part to a staid reverence for the lyric. Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry argues that humor is not a superficial feature of a small subset, but instead an integral feature in a great deal of American poetry written since the 1950s. Rather than viewing poetry as a lofty, serious genre, Carrie Conners asks readers to consider poetry alongside another art form that has burgeoned in America since the 1950s: stand-up comedy. Both art forms use wit and laughter to rethink the world and the words used to describe it. Humor's disruptive nature makes it especially whetted for critique. Many comedians and humorous poets prove to be astute cultural critics. To that end, Laugh Lines focuses on poetry that wields humor to espouse sociopolitical critique. To show the range of recent American poetry that uses humor to articulate sociopolitical critique, Conners highlights the work of poets working in four distinct poetic genres: traditional, received forms, such as the sonnet; the epic; procedural poetry; and prose poetry. Marilyn Hacker, Harryette Mullen, Ed Dorn, and Russell Edson provide the main focus of the chapters, but each chapter compares those poets to others writing humorous political verse in the same genre, including Terrance Hayes and Anne Carson. This comparison highlights the pervasiveness of this trend in recent American poetry and reveals the particular ways the poets use conventions of genre to generate and even amplify their humor. Conners argues that the interplay between humor and genre creates special opportunities for political critique, as poetic forms and styles can invoke the very social constructs that the poets deride.

In the context of a diversified and pluralistic arena of contemporary literature embodying previously marginalized voices of region, ethnicity, gender, and class, black poets living in Britain developed a distinct branch of contemporary poetry. Having emerged from a struggle to give voice to marginalized groups in Britain, the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson, David Dabydeen, and Fred D'Aguiar helped define national identity and explored racial oppression. Motivated by a sense of responsibility towards their communities, these poets undertook the task of transmitting black history to young blacks who risked losing ties to their roots. They also emphasized the necessity of fighting racism by constructing an awareness of Afro-Caribbean national identity while establishing black cultural heritage in contemporary British poetry. In this book, Turkish literary scholar Dilek Bulut Sar?kaya examines their works. Linton Kwesi Johnson's Voices of the Living and the Dead (1974), Inglan is a Bitch (1980), and Tings an Times (1991) open the study, followed by David Dabydeen's Slave Song (1984), Coolie Odyssey (1988), and Turner (1994) and, finally, Fred D'Aguiar's Mama Dot (1985), Airy Hall (1989) and British Subjects (1993).

Is poetry still relevant today, or is it merely a dwindling historical art? How have poets of the recent past dealt with challenges to poetics? Seeking to chart the poetic act in a period not so much hostile as indifferent to poetry, Language at the Boundaries outlines spaces where poetry and poetics emerge in migration, translation, world literature, canon formation, and the history of science and technology. One can only come so close to fully possessing or explaining everything about the poetic act, and this book grapples with these limits by perusing, analyzing, deconstructing, and reconstructing creativity, implementing different approaches in doing so. Peter Carravetta consolidates historical epistemological positions that have accrued over the last several decades, some spurred by the modernism/postmodernism debate, and unpacks their differences--juxtaposing Vico with Heidegger and applying the approaches of translation studies, decolonization, indigeneity, committed literature, and critical race theory, among others. What emerges is a defense and theory of poetics in the contemporary world, engaging the topic in a dialectic mode and seeking grounds of agreement.

Key Features: Study methods Introduction to the text Summaries with critical notes Themes and techniques Textual analysis of key passages Author biography Historical and literary background Modern and historical critical approaches Chronology Glossary of literary terms

Key Features: Study methods Introduction to the text Summaries with critical notes Themes and techniques Textual analysis of key passages Author biography Historical and literary background Modern and historical critical approaches Chronology Glossary of literary terms

This book offers new insights into the twelfth-century Persian poet Nezami Ganjavi. Challenging the dominant interpretation of Nezami's poetry as the product of mysticism or Islam, this book explores Nezami's literary techniques such as his pictorial allegory and his profound conceptualization of poetry, rhetoric, and eloquence. It employs several theoretical and methodological approaches to clarify the nature of his artistic approach to poetry. Chapters explore Nezami's understanding of rhetoric and literature as Sakhon, his interest in literary genres, the diversity of themes explored in his Five Treasures, the sources of Nezami's creativity, and his literary devices. Exploring themes such as love, religion, science, wine, gender, and philosophy, this study compares Nezami's works to other giants of Persian poetry such as Ferdowsi, Jami, Rudaki, and others. The book argues that Nezami's main concern was to weave poetry rather than to promote any specific ideology.

While the legacy of Black urban rebellions during the turbulent 1960s continues to permeate throughout US histories and discourses, scholars seldom explore within scholarship examining Black Cultural Production, artist-writers of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) that addressed civil unrest, specifically riots, in their artistic writings. Start a Riot! Civil Unrest in Black Arts Movement Drama, Fiction, and Poetry analyzes riot iconography and its usefulness as a political strategy of protestation. Through a mixed-methods approach of literary close-reading, historical, and sociological analysis, Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani considers how BAM artist-writers like Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Ben Caldwell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, and Henry Dumas challenge misconceptions regarding Black protest through experimental explorations in their writings. Representations of riots became more pronounced in the 1960s as pivotal leaders shaping Black consciousness, such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., were assassinated. BAM artist-writers sought to override the public's interpretation in their literary exposes that a riot's disjointed and disorderly methods led to more chaos than reparative justice. Start a Riot! uncovers how BAM artist-writers expose anti-Black racism and, by extension, the United States' inability to compromise with Black America on matters related to citizenship rights, housing (in)security, economic inequality, and education-tenets emphasized during the Black Power Movement. Abdul-Ghani argues that BAM artist-writers did not merely write literature that reflected a spirit of protest; in many cases, they understood their texts, themselves, as acts of protest.

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'There is no greater sorrow then to recall our times of joy in wretchedness.' Considered one of the greatest medieval poems written in the common vernacular of the time, Dante's Inferno begins on Good Friday in the year 1300. As he wanders through a dark forest, Dante loses his way and stumbles across the ghost of the poet Virgil. Virgil promises to lead him back to the top of the mountain, but to do so, they must pass through Hell, encountering all manner of shocking horrors, sins and evil torments along the way, evoking questions about God's justice, human behaviour and Christianity.

Humphrey Jennings was one of Britain's greatest documentary film-makers, described by Lindsay Anderson in 1954 as 'the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced'. A member of the GPO Film Unit and director of wartime canonical classics such as Listen to Britain (1942) and A Diary for Timothy (1945), he was also an acclaimed writer, painter, photographer and poet. This seminal collection of critical essays, first published in 1982 and here reissued with a new introduction, traces Jennings's fascinating career in all its aspects with the aid of documents from the Jennings family archive. Situating Jennings's work in the world of his contemporaries, and illuminating the qualities by which his films are now recognised, Humphrey Jennings: Film-Maker, Painter, Poet explores the many insights and cultural contributions of this truly remarkable artist.