First full-length biography for 30 years of the great First World War poet. Siegfried Sassoon praised Isaac Rosenberg's 'genius' and T.S. Eliot called him the 'most extraordinary' of the Great War poets. Rosenberg died on the Western Front in 1918 aged only twenty-seven, his tragic early death resembling that of many other well-known poets of that conflict. But he differed from the majority of Great War poets in almost every other respect - race, class, education, upbringing, experience and technique. He was a skilled painter as well as a brilliant poet. The son of impoverished immigrant Russian Jews, he served as a private in the army and his perspective on the trenches is quite different from the other mainly officer-poets. Jean Moorcroft Wilson focuses on the relationship between Rosenberg's life and work - his childhood in Bristol and the Jewish East End of London; his time at the Slade School of Art and friendship with David Bomberg, Mark Gertler and Stanley Spencer; and his harrowing life as a private in the British Army.

English Alliterative Verse tells the story of the medieval poetic tradition that includes Beowulf, Piers Plowman, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, stretching from the eighth century, when English poetry first appeared in manuscripts, to the sixteenth century, when alliterative poetry ceased to be composed. Eric Weiskott draws on the study of meter to challenge the traditional division of medieval English literary history into Old English and Middle English periods. The two halves of the alliterative tradition, divided by the Norman Conquest of 1066, have been studied separately since the nineteenth century; this book uses the history of metrical form and its cultural meanings to bring the two halves back together. In combining literary history and metrical description into a new kind of history he calls 'verse history', Weiskott reimagines the historical study of poetics.

Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) is the only Russian poet who has been taken seriously by Russian leaders: Khrushchev sent him to the Gulag (1964), Brezhnev exiled him (1972), Gorbachev paid him a visit in the Library of Congress (1992), and Chernomyrdin demanded that his body be returned to Russia (1996). He is the most important poet Russia has produced in the second part of the twentieth century. Nobody after Pushkin has done as much as Brodsky for Russian poetry, introducing many features of English and American poetics, a new linguistic substratum to Russian poetry, new genres, and a new mentality. He replaced the hot-blooded, hysterical note of Russian poetry with a rational approach to the most profound problems of our time. His tragic perception of the world combines with skilfully camouflaged irony, self-deprecation, and technical virtuosity.Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature Valentina Polukhina, who knew Brodsky well over a long period, has been studying and writing about him for at least 30 years. Her second volume of interviews draws on eye-witness accounts of his friends, publishers, editors, translators, and fellow poets. It is a series of important discussions on the style, ideas, and personality of one of the most brilliant and paradoxical poets of our time. Subtle, incisive, and rigorous in its critical evaluation, each discussion significantly advances our understanding of Brodsky's complex poetic world. All discussions are linked by core questions that are carefully and sometimes provocatively formulated. This collection of 40 interviews illuminates a peculiarly intriguing contemporary phenomenon and affords a fascinating insight into the American literary scene.

Hopkins's letters are his secular confessional, and if we wish to understand the man and his poetry, this is material we cannot ignore. This is where his mind allowed itself its most expansive and unfettered expression.
This edition adds 43 letters to the total printed by Claude Colleer Abbott in his three-volume major edition of the mid-twentieth century. It further improves on the earlier editions in four ways: in its accuracy, in its order, in its inclusiveness, and in the thoroughness of its annotation. It is a completely new presentation of the letters, set out on radically different lines from earlier editions. It includes all the letters from Hopkins, but adds all the extant letters which were written to him. It is set out in a single chronological sequence, placing all the replies and queries at their appropriate place within the correspondence, thus providing as far as can be achieved, a narrative sequence. This acts in many ways as an informal intellectual biography of Hopkins, tracking his early ideas, his anxieties, his conversion, his friendships, his priesthood, his disappointments, and his ideas on literature and life. The transcriptions not only revise a large number of readings, but include all legible deletions and corrections, allowing the reader to follow the hesitancies and adjustments of Hopkins's mind.
Like most nineteenth-century poets, Hopkins never published a theoretical account of his work and his thoughts on poetry, but what he had to say can be found in these letters, and their extensive use by critics and poets indicates their richness as a source of ideas on Hopkins's poetry and on poetry and poetics in general.

The dithyramb, a choral song associated mostly with the god Dionysos, is the longest-surviving form of collective performance in Greek culture, lasting in its shifting shapes from the seventh century BC into late antiquity. Yet it has always stood in the shadow of its more glamorous relations - tragedy, comedy, and the satyr-play. This volume, with contributions from international experts in the field, is the first to look at dithyramb in its entirety, understanding it as an important social and cultural phenomenon of Greek antiquity.
Dithyramb in Context explores the idea that the dithyramb is much more than a complex poetic form: the history of the dithyramb is a history of changing performance cultures which form part of a continuous social process. How the dithyramb functions as a marker, as well as a carrier, of social change throughout Greek antiquity is expressed in themes as various as performance and ritual, poetics and intertextuality, music and dance, and history and politics. Drawing together literary critics, historians of religion, archaeologists, epigraphers, and historians, this volume applies a wide historical and geographical framework, scrutinizing the poetry and, for the first time, giving due weight to the evidence of epigraphy and the visual arts.

Modern poetry, at least according to the current consensus, is difficult and often depressing. But as Humor in Modern American Poetry shows, modern poetry is full of humorous moments, from comic verse published in popular magazines to the absurd juxtapositions of The Cantos. The essays in this collection show that humor is as essential to the serious work of William Carlos Williams as it is to the light verse of Phyllis McGinley. For the writers in this volume, the point of humor is not to provide "comic relief," a brief counterpoint to the poem's more serious themes; humor is central to the poems' projects. These poets use humor to claim their own poetic authority; to re-define literary tradition; to show what audience they are writing for; to make political attacks; and, perhaps most surprisingly, to promote sympathy among their readers. The essays in this book include single-author studies, discussions of literary circles, and theories of form. Taken together, they help to begin a new conversation about modernist poetry, one that treats its lighthearted moments not as decorative but as substantive. Humor defines groups and marks social boundaries, but it also leads us to transgress those boundaries; it forges ties between the writer and the reader, blurs the line between public and private, and becomes a spur to self-awareness.

This book frames British Romanticism as the artistic counterpart to a revolution in subjectivity occasioned by the rise of "The Rule of Law" and as a traumatic response to the challenges mounted against that ideal after the French Revolution. The bulk of this study focuses on Romantic literary replies to these events (primarily in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Blake), but its latter stages also explore how Romantic poetry's construction of the autonomous reading subject continues to influence legal and literary critical reactions to two modern crises in the rule of law: European Fascism and the continuing instability of legal interpretive strategy.

This fascinating study explores the multifarious erotic themes associated with the magic lantern shows, which proved the dominant visual medium of the West for 350 years, and analyses how the shows influenced the portrayals of sexuality in major works of Gothic fiction.

This book explores Langston Hughes's efforts to mediate problems of identity and ethics he faced as an African-American professional writer and intellectual. Determined on a literary career at a time when no African American had yet been able to live off his or her writing; constrained by poverty, racism, and lack of opportunity; and pressed by the hopes, expectations, and demands of readers and critics of all stripes, Hughes had to rely on his dexterity as a mediator among competing positions in order to preserve his art, his integrity, and his unique status as the literary voice of ordinary African Americans. Issues treated include Hughes's interventions in the shifting definition of "authentic blackness," his work toward a socially effectual discourse of racial protest, his involvement with liberal politics, his ambivalence toward moral compromise even as he engaged in it, and the imprint of all these matters in texts ranging from his poetry and fiction to his essays and newspaper columns. The conflicting facts, varied experiences, divided impulses, and thorny compromises of his own life led Hughes to develop artistically an inclusive vision of the black community that anticipates by several decades what many cultural critics have come to advocate. The book is also the first to analyze Hughes's executive-session testimony before Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which was treated as classified information for fifty years before finally being released to the public in 2003.

In 1967 the world of Milton studies was divided into two armed camps, one proclaiming that Milton was of the devil's party, the other proclaiming that the poet's sympathies are obviously with God and the angels loyal to him. The achievement of Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin was to reconcile the two camps by subsuming their claims in a single overarching thesis: Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are and therefore the fact of their divided responses makes perfect sense. Thirty years later the issues raised in Surprised by Sin continue to set the agenda and drive debate.

Faithful Labourers surveys and evaluates existing criticism of John Milton's epic Paradise Lost, tracing the major debates as they have unfolded over the past three centuries. Eleven chapters split over two volumes consider the key debates in Milton criticism, including discussion of Milton's style, his use of the epic genre, and his references to Satan, God, innocence, the fall, sex, nakedness, and astronomy. Volume one attends to questions of style and genre. The first three chapters examine the longstanding debate about Milton's grand style and the question of whether it forfeits the native resources of English. Early critics saw Milton as the pre-eminent poet of 'apt Numbers' and 'fit quantity', whose verse is 'apt' in the specific sense of achieving harmony between sound and sense; twentieth-century anti-Miltonists faulted Milton for divorcing sound from sense; late twentieth-century theorists have denied the possibility that sound can 'enact' sense. These are extreme changes of critical perception, and yet the story of how they came about has never been told. These chronological chapters explain the roots of these changes and, in doing so, engage with the enduring theoretical question of whether it is possible for sound to enact sense. Volume two considers interpretative issues, and each of the six chapters traces a key debate in the interpretation of Paradise Lost. They engage with such questions as whether Paradise Lost is an epic or an anti-epic, whether Satan runs away with the poem (and whether it is good that he does so), what it means to be innocent (or fallen), and whether Milton's poetry is hostile to women. A final chapter on the universe of Paradise Lost makes the provocative argument that almost every commentator since the middle of the eighteenth century has led readers astray by presenting Milton's universe as the medieval model of Ptolemaic spheres. This assumption, which has fostered the notion that Milton was backward-looking or anti-intellectual, rests upon a misreading of three satirical lines. Milton's earliest critics recognized that he unequivocally embraces the new astronomy of Kepler and Bruno.

This comprehensive study of the 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine is the first to be published in English for many years. Anthony Phelan examines the complete range of Heine's work, from the early poetry and 'Pictures of Travel' to the last poems, including personal polemic and journalism. Phelan provides original and detailed readings of Heine's major poetry and throws new light on his virtuoso political performances that have too often been neglected by critics. Through his critical relationship with Romanticism, Heine confronted the problem of modernity in startlingly original ways that still speak to the concerns of post-modern readers. Phelan highlights the importance of Heine for the critical understanding of modern literature, and in particular the responses to Heine's work by Adorno, Kraus and Benjamin. Heine emerges as a figure of immense European significance, whose writings now need to be seen as a major contribution to the articulation of modernity.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was one of the writers that defined the course of twentieth-century poetry. Her vivid, daring and complex poetry continues to captivate new generations of readers and writers.

In the Letters, we discover the art of Plath's correspondence, most of which has never before been published and is here presented unabridged, without revision, so that she speaks directly in her own words. Refreshingly candid and offering intimate details of her personal life, Plath is playful, too, entertaining a wide range of addressees, including family, friends and professional contacts, with inimitable wit and verve. The letters document Plath's extraordinary literary development: the genesis of many poems, short and long fiction, and journalism. Her endeavour to publish in a variety of genres had mixed receptions, but she was never dissuaded. Through acceptance of her work, and rejection, Plath strove to stay true to her creative vision. Well-read and curious, she offers a fascinating commentary on contemporary culture.

Leading Plath scholars Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, editor of The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962, provide comprehensive footnotes and an extensive index informed by their meticulous research. Alongside a selection of photographs and Plath's own line-drawings, the editors masterfully contextualise what the pages disclose.

This selection of early correspondence marks the key moments of Plath's adolescence, including childhood hobbies and high school boyfriends; her successful but turbulent undergraduate years at Smith College; the move to England and Cambridge University; and her meeting and marrying Ted Hughes, including a trove of unseen letters post-honeymoon, revealing their extraordinary creative partnership.

The rhymes in poems are important to understanding how poets write; and in the nineteenth century, rhyme conditioned the ways in which poets heard both themselves and each other writing. Sound Intentions studies the significance of rhyme in the work of Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins and other poets, including Coleridge, Byron, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Swinburne, and Hardy. The book's stylistic reading of nineteenth-century poetry argues for Wordsworth's centrality to issues of intention and chance in poets' work, and offers a reading of the formal choices made in poetry as profoundly revealing points of intertextual relation. Sound Intentions includes detailed consideration of the critical meaning of both rhyme and repetition, bringing to bear an emphasis on form as poetry's crucial proving-ground. In a series of detailed readings of important poems, the book shows how close formal attention goes beyond critical formalism, and can become a way of illuminating poets' deepest preoccupations, doubts, and beliefs. Wordsworth's sounding of his own poetic voice, in blank verse as well as rhyme, is here taken as a model for the ways in which later nineteenth-century poets attend to the most perplexing and important voicings of their own poetic originality.

This volume considers representations of space and movement in sources ranging from Roman comedy to late antique verse, exploring how poetry in the Roman world is fundamentally shaped by its relationship to travel within the geography of Rome's far-reaching empire. The volume surveys Roman poetics of travel and geography in sources ranging from Plautus to Augustan poetry, from the Flavians to Ausonius. The chapters offer a range of approaches to: the complex relationship between Latin poetry, Roman identity, imperialism, and travel and geospatial narratives; and the diachronic and generic evolutions of poetic descriptions of space and mobility. In addition, two chapters, including the concluding one, contextualize and respond to the volume's discussion of poetry by looking at ways in which Romans not only write and read poems about travel and geography, but also make writing and reading part of the experience of traveling, as demonstrated in their epigraphic practices. The collection as a whole offers important insights into Roman poetics and into ancient notions of movement and geographical space. Travel, Geography, and Empire in Latin Poetry will be of interest to specialists in Latin poetry, ancient travel, and Latin epigraphy as well as to those studying travel writing, geography, imperialism, and mobility in other periods. The chapters are written to be accessible to researchers, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates.

Ashok Bery moves the discussion of postcolonial poetry forward by applying transnational perspectives. This timely study looks at a selection of poets from different areas, including Heaney, Walcott, and Ramanujan. While making cross-cultural comparisons, the book situates works in their specific national, poetic, cultural, and political contexts. In contrast to most postcolonial criticism, particular attention is paid to the language and form of the poems.

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.

A thorough examination of the making of, transmission, and scholarly engagement with one of the most famous poems in the Spanish language. Completed shortly before Jorge Manrique's death in 1479, the Coplas por la muerte de su padre is arguably the most famous poem in the Spanish language. Since its first circulation in the same era, the text has occupied a prominent place in the Spanish literary tradition, becoming, along with its author, a cultural icon. This book explores the ways in which successive generations of readers and scholars have engaged with the poem. It also contextualizes the Coplas, Manrique's life, and his enduring reputation. The book is divided into four chapters. The first provides information about the historical setting of the Coplas and its earliest transmission. A chronological survey of the poem's reception comprises chapter 2 (the Renaissance and Baroque eras) and chapter 3 (literary reception in the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries). Chapter 4, "Shifting Literary Perspectives", examines how different perceptions of the meaning and form of the text have changed over the centuries, and the way in which translations have also revealed a variety of interpretations and transformations. Nancy Marino is Professor of Spanish, Adjunct Professor of History, and Consultant to the Vice President for Research at Michigan State University.

Speaking to You examines our pleasures in, accounts of, and uses for British poetry today. It explores the work of four important poets writing post-1960--Don Paterson, Geoffrey Hill, W.S. Graham, and C.H. Sissons--in order to show how contemporary British poetry's creative handling of addresses to 'you' are key in its interactions with readers, critics, lovers, editors, fellow poets, and deceased forebears.
The book lays out clearly, in four sections that focus on individual writers, how saying 'you' operates in contemporary poetry. It shows how lyric address is bound up with poetry's ability to delight, move and tease its public. It puts address into dialogue with a range of familiar literary figures across the ages - namely specific Modernist, Romantic, early Modern, and Classical poets - that will be familiar to scholars and ordinary readers alike.
From John Donne to Carol Ann Duffy, T.S. Eliot to Philip Larkin, Keats to Tony Harrison, address has been key in constructing political and personal identities. This book argues that, for contemporary poets - like that of these canonical writers - address is persuasive public interlocution; demanding 'you' rethink regional and historical allegiances.

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.

Why do authors use pseudonyms and pen-names, or ingeniously hide names in their work with acrostics and anagrams? How has the range of permissible given names changed and how is this reflected in literature? Why do some characters remain mysteriously nameless? In this rich and learned book, Alastair Fowler explores the use of names in literature of all periods - primarily English but also Latin, Greek, French, and Italian - casting an unusual and rewarding light on the work of literature itself. He traces the history of names through Homer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Thackeray, Dickens, Joyce, and Nabokov, showing how names often turn out to be the thematic focus. Fowler shows that the associations of names, at first limited, become increasingly salient and sophisticated as literature itself develops.

A fascinating new study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'The Private Lives of the Ancient Mariner' illuminates the poet's deeply troubled personality and stormy personal life through a highly original study of his relationships. In her last published work the celebrated Coleridgean scholar, Molly Lefebure, provides profound psychological insights into Coleridge through a meticulous study of his domestic life, drawing upon a vast and unique body of knowledge gained from a lifetime's study of the poet, and making skilful use of the letters, poems and biographies of the man himself and his family and friends. The author traces the roots of Coleridge's unarguably dysfunctional personality from his earliest childhood; his position as his mother's favoured child, the loss of this status with the death of his father, and removal to the 'Bluecoat' school in London. Coleridge's narcissistic depression, flamboyance, and cold-hearted, often cruel, rejection of his family and of loving attachments in general are examined in detail. The author also explores Coleridge's careers in journalism and politics as well as poetry, in his early, heady 'jacobin' days, and later at the heart of the British wartime establishment at Malta. His virtual abandonment of his children and tragic disintegration under the influence of opium are included in the broad sweep of the book which also encompasses an examination of the lives of Coleridge's children, upon whom the manipulations of the father left their destructive mark. Molly Lefebure unravels the enigma that is Coleridge with consummate skill in a book that will bring huge enjoyment to any reader with an interest in the poet's life and times. Molly Lefebure (1919-2013) was a wartime journalist, novelist, children's author, writer on the topography of Cumbria, biographer, and independent scholar and lecturer. She is the author of two other works on the Coleridge family and a volume on the world of Thomas Hardy. Lefebure was secretary to Professor Keith Simpson (1907-1985), the renowned Home Office Pathologist and head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Guy's Hospital, with whom she worked during the Second World War. While surrounded by London's crime, grime and gruesome deaths she wrote a memoire, published as 'Evidence for the Crown' (1955), which formed the basis for the successful television drama, 'Murder on the Home Front' (2013). Having been fascinated by her work in the mortuaries, Lefebure continued at Guy's Hospital and studied drug addiction for six years, which led her to write her first biography of Coleridge ('Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium', 1974). 'Private Lives of the Ancient Mariner' is the distillation of the lifetime's thought of one whom many regard as having been one of the foremost Coleridgean scholars in the world. 'Molly Lefebure's insight into Coleridge's marriage is second to none. Her perception of him as a man and a poet is intellectually formidable. She can be both critical and understanding on the same page. There is a full field of Coleridge scholars at the moment, but in my view Molly was in there first, and is still the outstanding one.' From the Foreword by Melvyn Bragg.

Edmund Spenser's innovative poetic works have a central place in the canon of English literature. Yet he is remembered as a morally flawed, self-interested sycophant; complicit in England's ruthless colonisation of Ireland; in Karl Marx's words, 'Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet'- a man on the make who aspired to be at court and who was prepared to exploit the Irish to get what he wanted. In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the poet for 60 years, Andrew Hadfield finds a more complex and subtle Spenser. How did a man who seemed destined to become a priest or a don become embroiled in politics? If he was intent on social climbing, why was he so astonishingly rude to the good and the great - Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester, Sir Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I and James VI? Why was he more at home with 'the middling sort' - writers, publishers and printers, bureaucrats, soldiers, academics, secretaries, and clergymen - than with the mighty and the powerful? How did the appalling slaughter he witnessed in Ireland impact on his imaginative powers? How did his marriage and family life shape his work? Spenser's brilliant writing has always challenged our preconceptions. So too, Hadfield shows, does the contradictory relationship between his between life and his art.

Exam board: AQA, Edexcel, OCR and WJEC Level: AS/A-level Subject: English Literature First teaching: September 2015 First exams: Summer 2016 Enable students to achieve their best grade in AS/A-level English Literature with this year-round course companion; designed to instil in-depth textual understanding as students read, analyse and revise the AQA A Poetry Anthology throughout the course. This Study and Revise guide: - Increases students' knowledge of the AQA A Poetry Anthology as they progress through the detailed commentary and contextual information written by experienced teachers and examiners - Develops understanding of characterisation, themes, form, structure and language, equipping students with a rich bank of textual examples to enhance their coursework and exam responses - Builds critical and analytical skills through challenging, thought-provoking questions and tasks that encourage students to form their own personal responses to the text - Extends learning and prepares students for higher-level study by introducing critical viewpoints, comparative references to other literary works and suggestions for independent research - Helps students maximise their exam potential using clear explanations of the Assessment Objectives, sample student answers and examiner insights - Improves students' extended writing techniques through targeted advice on planning and structuring a successful essay Please note: This book uses early modern English spelling, in accordance with the AQA Anthology.

The Remembered Dead explores the ways poets of the First World War - and later poets writing in the memory of that war - address the difficult question of how to remember, and commemorate, those killed in conflict. It looks closely at the way poets struggled to meaningfully represent dying, death, and the trauma of witness, while responding to the pressing need for commemoration. The authors pay close attention to specific poems while maintaining a strong awareness of literary and philosophical contexts. The poems are discussed in relation to modernism and myth, other forms of commemoration (such as photographs and memorials), and theories of cultural memory. There is fresh analysis of canonical poets which, at the same time, challenges the confines of the canon by integrating discussion of lesser-known figures, including non-combatants and poets of later decades. The final chapter reaches beyond the war's centenary in a discussion of one remarkable commemoration of Wilfred Owen.