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.

The purpose of this series is to promote the study of writing in the English language through the introduction of the major figures writing in English throughout the ages. They provide an analytical and historical framework for understanding their subjects. This study explores Philips Larkin's major collections of poetry as well as his main prose writings, making a balanced judgement of his achievements. It shows Larkin's consistent quality as a poet, as well as his limitations of culrural conservatism and his equivocal commitment to love.

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.

This chronological account of the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is built up from contemporary documents, including the letters and journals of the writer and of his family and friends. Maps, a family tree and an index are included along with over 50 biographical sketches of the Coleridge circle. The progress of the writer's education, reading, friendships and intellectual interests is carefully adumbrated and the book provides a full background to the genesis of the literary work. Along with descriptions of the genesis of Coleridge's major works, a juxtaposition is made of the writer's views with those of Wordsworth. Valerie Purton has co-written "Poems by Two Brothers: A Study of George Clayton Tennyson and Charles Tennyson D'Eyncout", and published articles in "A.R.I.E.L. and Prose Studies" and "The Dictionary of British Women Writers".

In "Unfettering Poetry: The Fancy in British Romanticism," Jeffrey C. Robinson argues that politically progressive Romantic poets write with a politically progressive or radical poetics, coded during the Romantic Period as "the Fancy." Traditional readings of Romantic poetics that emphasize the drama of the speaker or lyric subject reveal a pervasive "fanciphobia," or fear of the Fancy's inclination for a poetry of inclusiveness, expansiveness, and visionary transformation of the object or "the world," and of an experimentation with and unfettering of poetic form and content. In fact, Robinson locates a poetry of the Fancy as the bedrock of Romantic poetic intention (having resonances in the experimental poetries of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries), with extended readings of the relatively unexplored poetry of Robinson, Hunt, Reynolds, Clare, and Hemans, as well as a radical rethinking of the familiar poetry of Wordsworth and Keats.

This collection of essays focuses on the remarkable late writings of Robert Duncan. Although praised by reviewers, Duncan's last two books of poetry have yet to receive the critical attention they merit. Written by a cast of emerging and established scholars, these essays bring together a diverse set of approaches to reading Duncan's writing.

Martjie Bosman se debuutbundel, wat in 2003 met die Ingrid Jonkerprys vir poesie bekroon is. Die verse in hierdie versameling getuig van sterk beheer oor verstegniek, sober eenvoud en uitgebreide kennis van die breer literatuurlandskap. Dit spreek ook van intense meelewing met die geskiedenis en die natuur.

This collection of thirteen essays by an international group of scholars focuses on the impact of the Protestant Reformation on Donne's life, theology, poetry, and prose. The early transition from Catholicism to Protestantism was a complicated journey for England, as individuals sorted out their spiritual beliefs, chose their political allegiances, and confronted an array of religious differences that had sprung forth in their society since the reign of Henry VIII. Inner anxieties often translated into outward violence. Amidst this turmoil the poet and Protestant preacher John Donne (1572-1631) emerged as a central figure, one who encouraged peace among Christians. Raised a Catholic but ordained in 1615 as an Anglican clergyman, Donne publicly identified himself with Protestantism, and yet scholars have long questioned his theological orientation. Drawing upon recent scholarship in church history, the authors of this collection reconsider Donne's relationship to Protestantism and clearly demonstrate the political and theological impact of the Reformation on his life and writings. The collection includes thirteen essays that together place Donne broadly in the context of English and European traditions and explore his divine poetry, his prose work, the Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and his sermons. It becomes clear that in adopting the values of the Reformation, Donne does not completely reject everything from his Catholic background. Rather, the clash of religion erupts in his work in both moving and disconcerting ways. This collection offers a fresh understanding of Donne's hardwon irenicism, which he achieved at great personal and professional risk.

In this 2nd edition of her classic work Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, Isobel Armstrong provides:

• a new preface that notes key directions in Victorian poetry criticism the turn to form, the turn to affect and the emotions, cosmopolitan and global impulses, and the attention to optical culture
• an afterword devoted to the Fin de Siecle, discussing Michael Field and Vernon Lee, the late epics of Swinburne and Morris, and a selection of Hardy lyrics
• a full bibliography for the last twenty years, taking into account in particular the work of Herbert Tucker, Yopie Prins, Cornelia Pearsall, Catherine Robson, Mike Sanders, Danny Karlin, Ana Vadillo and Marion Thain.

Critics have long understood the development of Romantic aesthetics as a turning point in the history of literary theory, a turn that is responsible for theories of mind and body that continue to inform our understandings of subjectivity and embodiment today. Yet the question of what aesthetic experience can "do" grates against the fact that much Romantic writing represents subjects as not actually in charge of the feelings they feel, the dreams they dream, or the actions they take. In response to this dilemma, Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation argues that being moved contrary to one's will is itself an aesthetic phenomenon explored by Romantic poets whose experiments with poetic form and genre provoke unanticipated feelings through verse. By analyzing how Romantic poets intervene, affectively and aesthetically, in readerly expectations of form and genre, Mathes shows how provocations disrupt and invite, disturb and compel-interrupting or suspending or retreating in ways that ask readers to orient themselves, materially and socially, in relation to literary experiences that are at once virtual and embodied. Examining the formal tactics of Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, alongside their reactions to historical events such as Toussaint Louverture's revolt and the Peterloo Massacre, Mathes reveals that an aesthetics of radical openness is central to the development of literary theory and criticism in Romantic Britain.

Catullan Questions Revisited offers a new insight into the brilliant poet who loved an aristocratic girl, attacked Julius Caesar and became a satirical playwright. Insisting on scrupulous use of the primary sources, Peter Wiseman combines textual, historical and even archaeological evidence to explode the orthodox view of Catullus' life and work. 'Lesbia' was not a woman in her thirties, as has been believed for 150 years, but a girl only recently married; Catullus' poems were written for performance, private or public, and it was only in 54 BC, at what he saw as the turning-point of his life, that he collected their texts into a sequence of probably seven volumes. His subsequent literary career, equally successful but much less well attested, was as a 'mime'-dramatist. This book is intended for everyone who is interested in poetry and history, and who does not believe that literary texts exist in a vacuum.

Specially commissioned essays offer revisionary readings of canonical poets and bring into focus rediscovered writers. The specially commissioned essays in Victorian Women Poets, written by scholars from Britain and North America, offer revisionary readings of canonical poets and bring into focus re-discovered writers. The volume both engages critically with the political and aesthetic agenda behind the project of recovery, and also presents a pioneering approach to reading poets who have slipped out of the canon. The work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and ChristinaRossetti is re-assessed and given surprising and innovative literary, political and intellectual contexts that will change the way we interpret their poetry. Writers of emerging significance, such as Theodosia Garrow Trollope, Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind, Michael Field and Margaret Veley, are given prominence in groundbreaking analysis that situates their writing within the wider debates of the period. The themes interwoven throughout the essays - literary history and canonicity, political poetics, nationhood, print culture, and genre - provide a radically new understanding of Victorian women's poetry that maps an agenda for future research. JOSEPH BRISTOW, SUSAN BROWN, GLENNIS BYRON, ALISON CHAPMAN, NATALIE M. HOUSTON, MICHELE MARTINEZ, PATRICIA PULHAM, MARJORIE STONE. ALISON CHAPMAN lectures in English literature at the University of Glasgow.

The Poetry and Music of Joaquin Sabina: An Angel with Black Wings is a thoroughly researched exploration of the life, music, and song lyrics of the celebrated Spanish singer-songwriter Joaquin Sabina. Often called "the Spanish Dylan," Sabina has established his own highly poetic space over the course of his forty-plus years as a recording artist. Using selected song lyrics from his fifteen studio and three major live albums, Daniel J. Nappo analyzes Sabina's use of antithesis, simile, metaphor, synesthesia, rhyme, and other rhetorical and poetic devices. Nappo also devotes a chapter to Sabina's ability as a narrator and concludes the book with a comparison of Sabina's best work with that of the American singer-songwriter and Nobel laureate, Bob Dylan.