The fabled cities of Italy--Florence, Venice, and Rome--have each acquired a distinctive tradition of literary representation involving characteristic, recurrent motifs and symbolic signatures. A wealth of writing on each is examined in fiction and poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries mainly by British and American authors. Included are works by Robert Browning on Florence and Rome; George Eliot, W.D. Howells, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence on Florence; Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, L.P. Hartley, and Anthony Hecht on Venice; Arthur Hugh Clough, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, and Aldous Huxley on Rome; and Henry James and Bernard Malamud on Florence, Venice, and Rome.

The analysis points to Florence frequently being depicted in terms of binary oppositions, including Hebraism versus Hellenism, past versus present, stasis versus movement, and light versus darkness. Venetian narratives are commonly infused with motifs relating to dream and unreality, obsession, voyeurism, isolation, melancholia, and death. History is a controlling metaphor for Roman fiction and poetry, combined with the motif of change and, especially, fall from innocence to experience. Ross shows how writers have self-consciously built on the literary conventions set earlier and anticipates that these cities will remain natural loci for continued post-modernist experiment. In a wider theoretical framework, he examines this writing identified with place for the light it sheds on the issue of the importance of setting in literature.

Concentrating on W. H. Auden's work from the late 1930s, when he seeks to understand the poet's responsibility in the face of a triumphant fascism, to the late 1950s, when he discerns an irreconcilable "divorce" between poetry and history in light of industrialized murder, this startling new study reveals the intensity of the poet's struggles with the meanings of history. Through meticulous readings, significant archival findings, and critical reflection, Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb presents a new image and understanding of Auden's achievement and reveals how his version of modernism illuminates urgent contemporary issues and theoretical paradigms: from the meaning of marriage equality to the persistence of fascism; from critical theory to psychoanalysis; from precarity to postcolonial studies. "The muse does not like being forced to choose between Agit-prop and Mallarme," Auden writes with characteristic lucidity, and this study elucidates the probity, humor, and technical skill with which his responses to historical reality in the mid-twentieth century illuminate our world today.

Since its first appearance in 1962, M. L. Rosenthal's classic selection of Yeats's poems and plays has attracted hundreds of thousands of readers. This newly revised edition includes 211 poems and 4 plays. It adds The Words Upon the Window-Pane, one of Yeats's most startling dramatic works in its realistic use of a seance as the setting for an eerily powerful reenactment of Jonathan Swift's rigorous idealism, baffling love relationships, and tragic madness. The collection profits from recent scholarship that has helped to establish Yeats's most reliable texts, in the order set by the poet himself. And his powerful lyrical sequences are amply represented, culminating in the selection from Last Poems and Two Plays, which reaches its climax in the brilliant poetic plays The Death of Cuchulain and Purgatory.

Scholars, students, and all who delight in Yeats's varied music and sheer quality will rejoice in this expanded edition. As the introduction observes, "Early and late he has the simple, indispensable gift of enchanting the ear....He was also the poet who, while very much of his own day in Ireland, spoke best to the people of all countries. And though he plunged deep into arcane studies, his themes are most clearly the general ones of life and death, love and hate, man's condition, and history's meanings. He began as a sometimes effete post-Romantic, heir to the pre-Raphaelites, and then, quite naturally, became a leading British Symbolist; but he grew at last into the boldest, most vigorous voice of this century." Selected Poems and Four Plays represents the essential achievement of the greatest twentieth-century poet to write in English.

The "kissing-poem" genre was wide-spread in Renaissance literature; this book surveys its form and development. There is a great deal of kissing in Renaissance poetry, but modern critics do not generally recognise (as early readers did) that the literary conventions of the kiss were closely related to a fully-formed, lively and popular genre of Neo-Latin "kissing-poems". Beginning with the imitation of Catullus in fifteenth-century Italy, this specialised form was securely established in the next century by the Dutch poet Janus Secundus, whose elegant Basia ("Kisses") were an extraordinary international success. Secundus stimulated a long-lived tradition of Latin and vernacular "kisses", willfully repetitious and yet meticulously varied, which can tell us much about humanist poetics. This book offers a critical account of the Renaissance kiss-poem, using an abundance of vivid and often racy examples, many of them drawn from authors who are all but forgotten today. It shows that the genre had a sophisticated rationale and clear but flexible conventions. These include habits of irony, mood and structure that proved widely influential, and some slippery, self-conscious ways of dealing with masculine sexuality. Presenting new readings of English writers including Sidney, Shakespeare and Donne, the study also reminds us how important Neo-Latin writing was to the literary culture of early modern Britain. A number of well known texts are thus placed in a context unfamiliar to most modern scholars, in order to show how deftly their kisses engage with an international tradition of humanist poetry. Alex Wong is currently a Research Fellow in English literature at St John's College, University of Cambridge.

Pulitzer-prize winning poet and National Book Award winner, Mary Oliver, provides a graceful manual on the mechanics of poetical composition.

"True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, / As those move easiest who have learned to dance,” wrote Alexander Pope. “The dance,” in the case of this brief and luminous book, refers to the interwoven pleasures of sound and sense to be found in some of the most celebrated and beautiful poems in the English language, from Shakespeare to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Robert Frost. With a poet’s ear and a poet’s grace of expression, Mary Oliver helps us understand what makes a metrical poem work—and enables readers, as only she can, to “enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure.”

With an anthology of fifty poems representing the best metrical poetry in English, from the Elizabethan Age to Elizabeth Bishop.

Two of our foremost poets provide here a lucid, straightforward primer that "looks squarely at some of the headaches and mysteries of poetic form": a book for readers who have always felt that an understanding of form (sonnet, ballad, villanelle, sestina, among others) would enhance their appreciation of poetry. Tracing "the exuberant history of forms," they devote one chapter to each form, offering explanation, close reading, and a rich selection of examplars that amply demonstrate the power and possibility of that form.

This book examines the influence of American poetry on Seamus Heaney's achievement by close attention to the themes, style, and resonances of his poetry at different stages of his career, including his appointments in Berkeley and Harvard. Beginning with an examination of Heaney's education at Queen's University, this study presents comparative close readings which explore the influence of five American poets he read during this period: Robert Frost, John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop. Laverty demonstrates how Heaney returned to several of these poets in response to difficulty and to consolidate later aesthetic developments. Heaney's ambivalent critical treatment of Sylvia Plath is investigated, as is his partial misreading of Bishop, who is understood today more sensitively than in her lifetime. This study also probes the reasons for his elision of other prominent American writers, making this the first comprehensive assessment of American influence on Heaney's poetry.

<I>John Clare, Politics and Poetry</I> challenges the traditional portrait of "poor John Clare", the helpless victim of personal and professional circumstance. Clare's career has been presented as a disaster of editorial heavy-handedness, condescension, a poor market, and conservative patronage. Yet Clare was not a passive victim. This study explores the sources of the "poor Clare"' tradition, and recovers Clare's agency, revealing a writer fully engaged in his own professional life and in the social and political questions of the day.

Andrew Marvell's Liminal Lyrics: The Space Between is an interdisciplinary study of the major lyric poems of seventeenth-century British metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell. The poet and his work have generally proven enigmatic to scholars because both refuse to fit into normal categories and expectations. This study invites Marvell readers to view the poet and some of his representative lyrics in the context of the anthropological concept of liminality as developed by Victor Turner and enriched by Arnold Van Gennep, Jacques Lacan, and other observers of the in-between aspects of experience. The approach differs from previous attempts to "explain" Marvell in that it allows multidisciplinary and multi-media contexts in a broad matrix of the areas of experience and representation that defy boundaries, that blur the line at which entrance becomes exit. This study acknowledges that the poems discussed, and, by implication, the entire corpus of Marvell's work and the life that produced it, derive from a refusal to draw a definite divide. In analyzing a small selection of Marvell's life and lyrics as explorations of various realms of liminality in word and image, readers can see a passageway to the poet's works that never really reaches a destination; instead, the unlimited possibilities of the journey remain. Thus, the in-between aspects of the poet and his poetry actually define his technique as well as his brilliance.

An exploration of the legacy of The Waste Land on the centenary of its original publication, looking at the impact it had had upon criticism and new poetries across one hundred years. T. S. Eliot first published his long poem The Waste Land in 1922. The revolutionary nature of the work was immediately recognised, and it has subsequently been acknowledged as one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century, and as crucial for the understanding of modernism. The essays in this collection variously reflect on The Waste Land one hundred years after its original publication. At this centenary moment, the contributors both celebrate the richness of the work, its sounds and rare use of language, and also consider the poem's legacy in Britain, Ireland, and India. The work here, by an international team of writers from the UK, North America, and India, deploys a range of approaches. Some contributors seek to re-read the poem itself in fresh and original ways; others resist the established drift of previous scholarship on the poem, and present new understandings of the process of its development through its drafts, or as an orchestration on the page. Several contributors question received wisdom about the poem's immediate legacy in the decade after publication, and about the impact that it has had upon criticism and new poetries across the first century of its existence. An Introduction to the volume contextualises the poem itself, and the background to the essays. All pieces set out to review the nature of our understanding of the poem, and to bring fresh eyes to its brilliance, one hundred years on. Contributors: Rebecca Beasley, Rosinka Chaudhuri, William Davies, Hugh Haughton, Marjorie Perloff, Andrew Michael Roberts, Peter Robinson, Michael Wood.

The great Romantic poet Lord Byron starved himself compulsively for most of his life. His behaviour mystified his friends and other witnesses, yet he never imagined he was ill. Instead, he rationalised his behaviour as a fight for spiritual freedom and made it the cornerstone of his heroic ideal, which was central to his work and to his life and his death. This fresh biographical study aims to explore neglected or misunderstood aspects of his private life to illuminate his writing, his affairs with women, his passion for Napoleon and his conflicted friendships with Coleridge and Shelley. This in turn leads to a new understanding of his masterpiece, Don Juan. 15 July 2019 marks the 200th anniversary of its first publication. Antony Peattie situates these patterns of behaviour in a vividly rendered contemporary world, culminating in Byron's last days in Greece, where he tried to starve himself into heroic leadership but damaged his constitution, resulting in his death at the age of thirty-six.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the major Romantic Poets and wrote what is critically recognised as some of the finest lyric poetry in the English Language. In this volume, the editors have selected the most popular, significant and frequently taught poems from the 6-volume Longman Annotated edition of Shelley's poems. Each poem is fully annotated, explained and contextualised, along with a comprehensive list of abbreviations, an inclusive bibliography of material relating to the text and interpretation of Shelley's poetry, plus an extensive chronology of Shelley's life and works. Headnotes and footnotes furnish the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary for an informed reading of Shelley's richly varied and densely allusive verse, making this an ideal anthology for students, classroom use, and anyone approaching Shelley's poetry for the first time; however the level and extent of commentary and annotation will also be of great value for researchers and critics.

Traversing the themes of language, terror and representation, this is the first study to engage Coleridge through the sublime, showing him to have a compelling position in an ongoing conversation about finitude. Drawing on close readings of both his poetry and prose, it depicts Coleridge as a thinker of "the limit" with contemporary force.

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) was hailed by many in his day as America's foremost poet, outranking T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Ezra Pound. Perhaps best known for his sonnets, he startles readers into attention and response through deliberate obscurity and ambiguity and demanding syntax. Many of Robinson's works continue to be published today, introducing him to new generations of readers. This comprehensive encyclopedia provides information on Robinson's poems--he published more than 200--and also his less well-known prose works, along with entries on his family, friends, and professional associates. For entries on his writings, the year published, summaries of the works, background information, and critical commentary illuminating enigmatic passages are provided. For people, the entries provide biographical information and describe the influence the person had on Robinson's life.

Words from a mysterious land of age erupts into poetry with no reservation in print. These verses represent a life experience buried some sixty-five years, depicting the beauty of Southern nature and history, of death and love in waning years.

"Blake, Nation and Empire" challenges the orthodoxy of the politics of William Blake as exclusively radical, defined by his participation in the revolutionary ferment of the 1790s. It examines his work in the context of emergent discourses of nation and empire, and of the construction of a public sphere, and restores the longevity to his artistic career by placing particular emphasis on his output in the 1820s. Relevant contexts include technology, sentimentalism, Ireland and Catholic Emancipation, missionary prospectuses and body politics. Blake's work is shown not only to be complexly embedded in the culture of his time but also to prefigure and contest the imperial century of pax Britannica.

As W. H. Auden said to the ghost of Yeats in his famous elegy, when he died 'he became his admirers'. Not even Auden could have imagined just how prophetic that phrase would become. The battle over both Yeats' life and his poetry began almost immediately after his death, with some sides proudly claiming him as one of their very own, while others insisted he had never really been one of them at all. To what tradition does Yeats belong? To what culture? Was he Irish or Anglo-Irish, or even English? Was he a Romantic, Symbolist or Modernist poet? A nationalist, fascist or a postnationalist? This Guide follows the often heated debates on who Yeats was and what kind of poetry he wrote. Michael Faherty offers selections from the leading voices in these debates, setting them in the context of Irish cultural and political history.

In a wide-ranging and compelling account of the life of metrical and free verse in the twentieth century, poet and critic Jon Silkin deepens our understanding of the way poetry works on us. He begins from the premiss that two modes of verse, free and metrical, engage the creative energies of poetry now, creating a rich, fertile environment capable of yielding work valuable to poetry itself and to the society which has given it life. With a practitioner's empathy Silkin reads the poetry of Whitman, Hopkins, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Bunting and eight British poets from the post-second World War period to illustrate how free and metrical verse create, separately or together, a poetic harmony. Additionally, he includes crucial statements on modern poetry from poets themselves, concluding with a fine memoir of Basil Bunting by Connie Pickard, published in book-form for the first time.

Literary critic, poet and philologist as well as medievalist, with a particular interest in the powers and effects of poetic language, Marie Borroff brings the full range of her expertise to bear on problems of central importance in the poetry of Chaucer and his nameless contemporary, the Gawain--or Pearl--poet. This collection of essays, much of it previously unpublished, represents a major contribution to the study of late Middle English literature.