Brian Bremen's innovative re-examination of William Carlos Williams's life and work traces the development of Williams's poetics, focusing in particular on his ongoing fascination with the effects of poetry and prose. In an analysis informed by the insight of contemporary cultural critics, Bremen traces Williams's thought from the confused romanticism of Spring and All to the methodological empiricism of Paterson, examining in the process Williams's correspondence with life-long friend Kenneth Burke and their shared theoretical interests. Through this fresh conceptual frame-work, Bremen shows how Williams's role as poet becomes more congruous with his role as doctor. In addition, Bremen looks closely at Williams's economic and social theories in light of those of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, making a case for the consistency of Williams's thought on medicine, gender, economics, poetry and prose, and history. William Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Culture is essential reading for scholars not only of Williams, but also of Modernism, twentieth-century literature, and cultural criticism and history.

The letters of William Wordsworth provide a unique and vivid portrait of the personality and concerns of the poet, one which belies his reputation as a romantic dreamer obsessed with his own genius. This new selection presents 162 complete letters--eight of which have never before been published--drawn from the new and enlarged edition of The letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The subject matter of the letters, and the correspondents themselves, are as varied as the poet's own interests and preoccupations: topics range from literature, art, religion, and politics, to the changing landscape of the Lakes, walks in the countryside, family affairs, and the troubles and triumphs of friends and neighbors--literary figures such as Coleridge and De Quincy as well as people from many different walks of life whose names would otherwise be unknown to us but whom the poet favored with an equally deep and loyal friendship.

Spenser's ethics offers a novel account of Edmund Spenser as a moral theorist, situating his ethics at the nexus of moral philosophy's profound transformation in the early modern era, and the English colonisation of Ireland in the turbulent 1580's and 90's. It revises a scholarly narrative describing Spenser's ethical thinking as derivative, nostalgic, or inconsistent with one that contends him to be one of early modern England's most original and incisive moral theorists, placing The Faerie Queene at the centre of the contested discipline of moral philosophy as it engaged the social, political, and intellectual upheavals driving classical virtue ethics' unravelling at the threshold of early modernity. -- .

This book applies linguistic analysis to the poetry of Emeritus Professor Edwin Thumboo, a Singaporean poet and leading figure in Commonwealth literature. The work explores how the poet combines grammar and metaphor to make meaning, making the reader aware of the linguistic resources developed by Thumboo as the basis for his unique technique. The author approaches the poems from a functional linguistic perspective, investigating the multiple layers of meaning and metaphor which go into producing these highly textured, grammatically intricate works of verbal art. The approach is based on Systematic Functional Theory, which assists with investigating how the poet uses language (grammar) to craft his text, in a playful way that reflects a love of the language. The multilingual and multicultural experiences of the poet are seen to have contributed to his uniquely creative use of language. This work demonstrates how Systematic Functional Theory, with its emphasis on exploring the semogenic (meaning-making) power of language, provides the handle we need to better understand poetic works as intentional acts of meaning. The verbal art of Edwin Thumboo illustrate Barthes' point that "Bits of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc. pass into the text and are redistributed within it, for there is always language before and around the text." With a focus on meaning, this functional analysis of poetry offers an insightful look at the linguistic basis of Edwin Thumboo's poetic technique. The work will appeal to scholars with an interest in linguistic analysis and poetry from the Commonwealth and new literatures, and it is also well suited to support courses on literary stylistics or text linguistics.

Re-examining English Romanticism through Hegel's philosophy, this book outlines and expands upon Hegel's theory of recognition. Deakin critiques four canonical writers of the English Romantic tradition, Coleridge, Wordsworth, P.B. Shelley and Mary Shelley, arguing that they, as Hegel, are engaged in a struggle towards philosophical recognition.

This book fills a lacuna in the intellectual history of the seventeenth century by investigating the role that skepticism plays in the declining prestige of memory. It argues that Shakespeare and Donne revolutionize the art of memory, thanks to their skepticism, and thereby transform literary strategies like mimesis, exemplarity, and pastoral.

Philip Levine is one of the foremost poets of the last fifty years, but moreover he is a master and unparalleled practitioner of the long poem in our time. No recent poet has written as many exceptional long poems as Levine, and his influence has continued virtually undisturbed since his death in 2015. In this new anthology, twenty-one prominent American poets testify to Levine's immense importance and his singular mastery of the long poem's many forms, offering an important discussion of the signature form of one of the great poets of the English language. Contributors include Kelly Cherry, Kate Daniels, Peter Everwine, Kathy Fagan, Christopher Howell, Richard Jackson, Mark Jarman, Dorianne Laux, Paul Mariani, and many more.

The 14th edition of the International Who's Who in Poetry is a unique and comprehensive guide to the leading lights and freshest talent in poetry today. Containing biographies of more than 4,000 contemporary poets world-wide, this essential reference work provides truly international coverage. In addition to the well known poets, talented up-and-coming writers are also profiled.
Contents:
* Each entry provides full career history and publication details
* An international appendices section lists prizes and past prize-winners, organizations, magazines and publishers
* A summary of poetic forms and rhyme schemes
* The career profile section is supplemented by lists of Poets Laureate, Oxford University professors of poetry, poet winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, winners of the Pulitzer Prize for American Poetry and of the King's/Queen's Gold medal and other poetry prizes.

The empirical/evangelical dialectic of Romantic Anglo-America culminates in the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830-86). For example, just as her poems of science and technology reflect her faith in experience, and just as her lyrics about natural history build on this empiricism and develop her commitment to natural religion, so too do her poems of revealed religion constitute her experience of faith. Thus, for an American audience, Dickinson recasts British-Romantic themes of natural and spiritual perception. This double perspective, this counterintuitive combination of natural models with spiritual metaphors, parallels the androgynous ideal of her nineteenth-century feminism and champions her belief in immortality. The experience/faith paradox of her Late-Romantic imagination forms the mind and soul, as well as the heart, of her legacy.

"British Victorian Women's Periodicals" explores themes and patterns of poetry publication in a variety of women's periodicals published throughout the Victorian era to answer questions about taste, style, and the significance of poetry to our understanding of women's lives in the nineteenth century. Ledbetter shows how the periodical's advice about maintaining or acquiring social respectability through appropriate fashion, good behavior, and regulation of the household is seamlessly integrated with poetry that aimed to inspire, teach, and cultivate feeling. This book questions traditional evaluations of nineteenth-century sentimental poetry, and argues for a consideration of women's poetry within its own cultural milieu.

Using the 180-year history of Keats's Eve of St. Agnes as a basis for theorizing about the reading process, Stillinger's book explores the nature and whereabouts of `meaning' in complex works. A proponent of authorial intent, Stillinger argues a theoretical compromise between author and reader, applying a theory of interpretive democracy tha includes the endlessly multifarious reader's response as well as Keats's guessed-at intent. Stillinger also ruminates on the process of constructing meaning, and posits an answer to why Keats's work is considered canonical, and why it is still being read and admired.

Unruly women constantly speak out in lyric poetry, their voices brought to life in the bodies of female singers, dancers, and instrumentalists. Performing Women is the first book-length study of female performers in Galician-Portuguese and Castilian comic-satiric poetry. Filios reconstructs medieval women's oral performances by bringing modern ethnographic work and performance theory to bear on literary and historical evidence. Filios explores how women's performances (and men's impersonations of women) contributed to the construction of the court, the marketplace, and the countryside as cultural spaces defined by certain acts, discourses, and conflicts. She argues that poetic portraits of sexually aggressive courtesans, bread sellers, and mountain women allowed elite men to portray their own sexuality as transgressive and to adopt temporarily a female identity, enabling them to speak and act as a degraded other. While these portraits may be misogynistic, they also demonstrate that poets appreciated marginalized women's characters, placing speeches overtly critical of dominant power structures in their mouths and constructing imaginary communities around them. Men wrote these characters, women appropriated them, ironically performing as themselves. By situating medieval lyric poems in their dialogic performance context, this study demonstrates the centrality female performers in poetic spectacles.

Troubled by his complex sexuality, Monro was a tormented soul whose aim was to serve the cause of poetry. Hibberd's revealing and beautifully-written biography will help rescue Monro from the graveyard of literary history and claim for him the recognition he deserves. Poet and businessman, ascetic and alcoholic, socialist and reluctant soldier, twice-married yet homosexual, Harold Monro probably did more than anyone for poetry and poets in the period before and after the Great War, and yet his reward has been near oblivion. Aiming to encourage the poets of the future, he befriended, among many others, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and the Imagists; Rupert Brooke and the Georgians; Marinetti the Futurist; Wilfred Owen and other war poets; and the noted women poets, Charlotte Mew and Amma Wickham.

This book aims to make a significant contribution to English literary studies which explore connections between the medieval and Renaissance periods of English literature. Specifically, it seeks to demonstrate that Spensers absorption of Middle English romance is an important aspect of The Faerie Queene which should lead to a revised understanding of the works nativeness. Furthermore, King's argument that Spenser adapted Middle English romance to illustrate Protestant and Elizabethan doctrines and cultural values has important implications beyond Spenserian studies, as does the material dealing with the post-medieval availability of Middle English romance.

Wilfred Owen's poetry is now very widely known as the finest that came out of the First World War. But much about the poet and his work has not been fully understood. This book, based on unrivalled research, is the first to study of Owen's complete poetic achievement, revealing the uniqueness, strangeness and unity of what he called his 'poethood'. His war poems are shown to be a consistent development from his prewar verse and his unswerving allegiance to Romanticism; they grew out of a pattern of mythologised secret experience that took shape in some of his least-known manuscripts before he knew anything of the trenches. Owen lived for poetry; many unfamiliar aspects of that life are brought into focus, including his early discovery of Georgianism, his battle wirh Revivalist religion, his debt to the French Decadence, his alleged cowardice, the torment of his shellshock and the remarkable 'sociological' treatment he received for it, his sexual nature and his friendship with Oscar Wilde's beleaguered disciples in 1918, and his supreme courage in making poetry out of inner horrors deliberately 'recollected in tranquility'. Learning from Wordsworth and Shelley, Aesthetes and Decadents, Sassoon and the Georgians, Hardy, Barbusse, Russell, Edward Carpenter and many others, Owen realised his life's ambition and became a profoundly origianal poet. Owen the Poet ends with chapters on two of his richest works: 'Strange Meeting', his worst shellshock nightmare, and 'Spring Offensive', the epilogue to all he wrote. Notes, appendixes and bibliography complete what is likely to be the most authoritative book on its subject for many years to come.

Frederick Glaysher invokes a global vision beyond the prevailing postmodern conceptions of life and literature that have become firmly entrenched in contemporary world culture. East and West meet in a new synthesis of a global vision of humankind ranging over classic literature, ancient and modern, both Western and non-Western, from the dilemmas of modernity in Yeats, Eliot, Milosz, Bellow, Dostoevsky, to Lu Xun, Ryuichi Tamura, Kenzaburo Oe, Naguib Mahfouz, R. K. Narayan, among others, from mimesis and deconstruction to the United Nations, with extensive essays on Chinese, Japanese, and South-Asian literature. Clearly the work of a poet-critic attempting to embrace a larger portion of human experience than the personal postmodern self, The Grove of the Eumenides reaches toward an epic vision of the twenty-first century. All the muck and glory of American and international experience and history mix in the complex tension of a mind struggling with itself and its Age. Acutely perceptive of the spiritual and moral nuances of literature, criticism, and culture, Glaysher confronts the loss of religious faith in the modern world and breaks through to a vision of the unity of the human longing for transcendence.

This collection of twelve critical essays on women's poetry of the eighteenth-century and Enlightenment is the first to range widely over individual poets and to undertake a comprehensive exploration of their work. Experiment with genre and form, the poetics of the body, the politics of gender, revolutionary critique, and patronage are themes of the collection, which includes discussion of the distinctive projects of Mary Leapor, Ann Yearslep, Helen Maria Williams, Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld and Lucy Aikin.

This volume of essays offers innovations in teaching Chaucer in higher education. The projects explored in this study focus on a student-centred, active learning designed to enhance independent research skills and critical thinking. These studies also seek to establish conversations - between teachers and learners, and students and their texts.

In Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts distinguished critics from Canada, Japan, the US, and the UK, offer fresh and challenging readings of Hardy's works. They also raise far wider and far-reaching questions about Hardy's attitude to his art, his relation to such contemporary forms as melodrama, and his response to the ongoing scientific debates, from Darwin to Einstein, about sexuality; personal identity; the meaning of suicide; and the nature of time.

"Hesiod: The Other Poet" is a study dealing with the role of Hesiod in the imagination and the collective memory of the ancient Greeks. Its main hypothesis is that Hesiod's image was to a large degree formed by the picture of Homer: Hesiod is decidedly different when presented as allied with, opposed to or simply without Homer. Following this approach, Hesiod is investigated as a moral and philosophical authority, a "locus" informed with values and qualities, a concept in literary-critical discourse, and more generally as a cultural and panhellenic icon constructed and reconstructed by later Greek authors who employed and so re-created him in their own texts.

This volume completes the five-volume Longman Annotated Poets Edition of the poems of John Dryden, the major poet of Restoration England. It provides a modernized text along with full explanatory annotation. The poems include Dryden's spirited translation from Ovid, Homer, Chaucer, and Boccaccio. This volume presents, in newly-edited texts and with a substantial editorial commentary, the complete non-dramatic poetry of John Dryden's later years. It contains the full text of Dryden's final collection, Fables Ancient and Modern, including its prose Dedication and Preface, together with a number of other poems of the late 1690s, and some posthumously published items.

The central character of Divine Yet Human Epics is the developing conception of epic itself. Its story unfolds as the ancient Greek idea of epic originates with Pindar and Herodotus on the basis of the Iliad and Odyssey. While this notion eventually leads their Sanskrit counterparts, the Ramaya?a and Mahabharata, to be understood selectively in modern times, medieval readers Anandavardhana and Rajasekhara reveal distinctive features of these ancient Indian poems earlier in this exegetical tale. Shubha Pathak's interpretative account concludes with a new way to connect these primary epics to their Greek analogues. Both epic pairs feature poetic kings who together affirm and interrogate their societies' central religious ideals: Greek kleos (or heroic glory, which assuages uncertainty about the afterlife) and Indian dharma (or righteousness, which counters encroaching immorality). The Greek and Sanskrit epics, by showing both the divine ease and the human difficulty with which kleos and dharma are achieved, employ similar teaching strategies to address the shared psychological needs of human beings learning to live within the disparate cultures of ancient Greece and India. This cross-cultural comparative study thus provides a more comprehensive perspective on the poems' religiosity than the vantage points of Hellenists or of Indologists alone.

Edward Thomas 1878-1917, published author, critic, and essayist, died at 39, a casualty of World War I. At the suggestion of his friend Robert Frost, Thomas began to write poetry and six months after his death his first book of poems was published. As the prose writer died, the poet was born, and it is on the poems that his reputation still rests. This new biography--based on some 1,800 of Thomas's letters--tells the story of his courtship, his restless marriage, and his tormented need to choose between happiness with his wife and children and the need to find his way as a writer alone. With delicacy and understanding the book describes Thomas's complex character and his pilgrimage on the road to self-discovery, and reveals how the emergence of Thomas the poet became inevitable.