Latin is very much alive in the poetry written by the great Latin poets, and this book is about their poetry, their language, and their culture. Fitzgerald shows the reader with little or no knowledge of the Latin language how it works as a unique vehicle for poetic expression and thought. Moving between close analysis of particular Latin poems and more general discussions of Latin poets, literature, and society, Fitzgerald gives the un-Latined reader an insider's view of how Latin poetry feels and what makes it worth reading today. His book explores what can be said and done in a poetry and a language that are both very different from English and yet have profoundly influenced it. He takes the reader through the whole range of Latin poetry from the trivial, obscene, and vicious, to the sublime, the passionate, and the uplifting. Individual chapters focus on particular authors (such as Vergil and Horace) or on themes (love, hate, civil war), and together they explain why we should care about what the poets of ancient Rome had to say. If you have ever wondered what all the fuss was about, see for yourselves!

The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms situates literary modernisms and the modernist arts in a series of unfolding relations with mass society and popular culture in both national and transnational settings. An unparalleled resource containing over fifty specially commissioned essays, the Handbook updates and extends the scope and depth of previous synoptic guides, bringing together new approaches to the more obvious themes of modernist studies as well as new research on the variety of cultural, aesthetic, and geographical factors that were intrinsic to the creation of modernism. The contributors draw upon a variety of interdisciplinary approaches and new methodologies in order to take account of the development of revisionist modernist studies over the past three decades. Two particularly innovative features of the Handbook are its focus upon the cross media and international character of modernism. A number of the essays examine visual culture and other media in order to delineate the aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural formations linking the innovations and experiments of literary modernism with work in other arts and media. Others seek to analyse how Anglo-American and European models were inflected in a different temporal frame and in quite distinct geographical contexts. The Handbook is divided into six sections in order to reflect changed critical perspectives upon modernism's formal innovation and experiment, to foreground the relation of literature and the other arts, and to understand these in appropriate intellectual, social, and geocultural settings. The received canon is therefore revisited and 'made new' as the varying aspects of metropolitan, regional, national, and transnational modernisms come into view.

This book sets out to navigate questions of the future of Australian poetry. Deliberately designed as a dialogue between poets, each of the four clusters presented here-"Indigeneities"; "Political Landscapes"; "Space, Place, Materiality"; "Revising an Australian Mythos"-models how poetic communities in Australia continue to grow in alliance toward certain constellated ideas. Exploring the ethics of creative production in a place that continues to position capital over culture, property over community, each of the twenty essays in this anthology takes the subject of Australian poetry definitively beyond Eurocentrism and white privilege. By pushing back against nationalizing mythologies that have, over the last 200 years since colonization, not only narrativized the logic of instrumentalization but rendered our lands precarious, this book asserts new possibilities of creative responsiveness within the Australian sensorium.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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".

Rachel Speght was the first Englishwoman to identify herself, unmistakably and by name, as a polemicist and critic of contemporary gender ideology. This edition includes her polemical foray into the Jacobean gender wars and her collected poems. Speght's tract, A Mouzzell for Melastomus (1617), is at once a spirited answer to Joseph Swetnam's attack on women and a serious effort to stake women's claim to the prevailing Protestant discourse of biblical exegesis. In other words, she tried to yield a more expansive and more equitable concept of gender. Speght's volume of poems, MoralitiesMemorandum with a Dream Prefixed (1621)--printed, in part, to counter charges that her prose was actually her father's-- includes a long memento mori meditation and an allegorical dream vision that recounts her own rapturous encounter with learning. Both texts vigorously defend women's education and encourage women's talents. This volume should find a ready audience among scholars and students of early seventeenth-century literature, history, and religion, as well as among those in women's studies.

The Northern Song poet He Zhu is best known for his lyrics (ci) but also produced shi poetry of subtlety, wit, and feeling. This study examines the latter as a response to the options available to a late-eleventh century writer in the pentametrical and heptametrical forms of Ancient Verse, Regulated Verse, and Quatrains. Numerous comparisons are made with Su Shi, Huang Tingjian, Du Fu, and other important writers. In a major advance over previous methodologies, the author uses a clear system of metrical notation to show how sound patterns reveal the poet's artistic and emotional intentions. This innovation and the author's other meticulous explorations of He Zhu's artistry allow us to experience Chinese poetry as never before. From the reader's report: "not just an excellent study of an individual poet but also a model of reading the language of classical Chinese poetry. ..] opens up a world of interpretive territory heretofore seldom explored."

Secular Chains offers an original and richly contextualized account of the relationship between poetry and religious controversy between 1649 and 1745. This was a period of political conflict and intellectual upheaval, in which traditional sources of spiritual authority were variously challenged and transformed. Philip Connell reveals the importance of English literary culture for our understanding of this process, and throws new light on the dynamics of change and continuity between the puritan revolution and the early Enlightenment. Based on extensive research in both printed and manuscript sources, the book combines detailed case studies of major literary figures with a sustained historical narrative linking the republican moment of the 1650s, the conflicts and crises of the Restoration, and the ecclesiastical politics of the early eighteenth century. Milton and Dryden provide the principal focus of the first three chapters, which explore the divisive issue of church settlement in the work of both writers, together with the increasingly prominent rhetoric of anti-clericalism and irreligion in the poetry and polemics of the later seventeenth century. Subsequent chapters extend the book's argument to the embattled condition of the Church of England in the decades after 1688, and the significant contribution of contemporary literary culture to a range of religious and philosophical argument, from heterodox free-thinking to Newtonian natural theology. Secular Chains demonstrates the close and continued relationship between poetry and religious politics in the age of Milton and Pope, and provides a new framework for understanding this complex and turbulent period in English literary history.

A new study of the continuations to Chretien's Conte du Graal shows their crucial influence on the development of Arthurian literature. Chretien de Troyes's late twelfth-century Conte du Graal has inspired writers and scholars from the moment of its composition to the present day. The challenge represented by its unfinished state was quickly taken up, and over the next fifty years the romance was supplemented by a number of continuations and prologues, which eventually came to dwarf Chretien's text. In one of the first studies to treat the Conte du Graal and its continuations as a unified work, Thomas Hinton considers the whole corpus as a narrative cycle. Through a combination of close textual readings and manuscript analysis, the author argues that the unity of the narrative depends on a balanced tension between centripetal and centrifugal dynamics. He traces how the authors, scribes and illuminators of the cycle worked to produce coherence, even as they contended with potentially disruptive forces: multiple authorship,differences of intention, and changes in the relation between text, audience and book. Finally, he tackles the long-held orthodoxy that places the Perceval Continuations on the margins of literary history. Widening the scope of enquiry to consider the corpus's influence on thirteenth-century verse romances, this study re-situates the Conte du Graal cycle as a vital element in the evolution of Arthurian literature. Thomas Hinton isJunior Research Fellow in Modern Languages at Jesus College, Oxford.

Eight centuries divide us from Fan Cheng-ta, but across this gap of time his voice may still be heard - suave, familiar, peaceable - in a cycle of small poems which, reflecting the Chinese rural year, seem as fresh today as when they first came from his brush. The task of rendering the quality of Chinese poetry into English is temptingly difficult; and success in such an enterprise is rare and rewarding. How it came to be attempted by an English poet with the help of a Chinese scholar is told briefly in Mr Bullett's preface. The current edition is a re-issue of Mr Bullett's 1946 text.

Dr Samuel Johnson (1709-84) is regarded as one of the outstanding figures of English literature, as a poet, essayist, moralist, critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. This collected edition of his works - commissioned by the publisher within hours of Johnson's death, such was his celebrity - was published in 1787 in eleven volumes, edited by his literary executor, the musicologist Sir John Hawkins. Volume 2 contains the first part of his Lives of the Poets, his last major work. This was a commission to provide short accounts of over fifty poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and set a new standard for English literary biography. Although not all of the subjects have been regarded as eminent by posterity, and Johnson was criticised for brusque treatment of well-connected courtier poets now largely forgotten, the work was a great success.

This comprehensive volume contains all Sylvia Plath's mature poetry written from 1956 up to her death in 1963. The poems are drawn from the only collection Plath published while alive, The Colossus, as well as from posthumous collections Ariel, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees. The text is preceded by an introduction by Ted Hughes and followed by notes and comments on individual poems. There is also an appendix containing fifty poems from Sylvia Plath's juvenilia. This collection was awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. 'For me, the most important literary event of 1981 has been the publication, eighteen years after her death, of Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems, confirming her as one of the most powerful and lavishly gifted poets of our time.' A. Alvarez in the Observer

The Epic Distilled is a rich exploration of Virgil's use of sources in the Aeneid, considering elements of history, geography, mythology, and ethnography. Building on and developing the research involved in the author's monumental commentaries on the Aeneid, the volume investigates how the poem was written, what Virgil read, and why particular details are interwoven into the narrative. The volume looks beyond the Aeneid's poetry and plot to focus on the 'matter' of the epic: details of colour, material, arms, clothing, landscape, and physiology. Details which might seem trivial are revealed as carefully deliberate and highly significant. For instance, one Trojan's specifically oriental trousers are suggestive of the Trojans' non-Roman 'otherness' and fit solidly into a complex ethnographic argument. In this way, the meaning and implications of Virgil's heavily allusive style, including practices and techniques of composition, are unpicked meticulously. Particularly difficult and intricate passages are delved into and the significance of specific details, legends, arcane references, places, names, digressions, and inconsistencies are uncovered. By exposing new layers of illuminating material, The Epic Distilled offers readers a fresh approach to understanding the full intellectual texture of Virgil's epic poem.

Dante's Lyric Redemption offers a re-examination of two strongly interrelated aspects of the poet's work: the role and value he ascribes to earthly love and his relationship to the Romance lyric tradition of his time. It argues that an account of Dante's poetic journey that posits a stark division between earthly and divine love, and between the secular lyric poet and the Christian auctor, does little justice to his highly distinctive and often polemical handling of these categories. The book firstly contextualizes, traces, and accounts for Dante's intriguing commitment to love poetry, from the 'minor works' to the Commedia. It highlights his attempts, especially in his masterpiece, to overcome normative oppositions in formulating a uniquely redemptive vernacular poetics, one oriented towards the eternal while rooted in his affective, and indeed erotic, past. It then examines how this matter is at stake in Dante's treatment of three important lyric predecessors: Guittone d'Arezzo, Arnaut Daniel, and Folco of Marseilles. Through a detailed reading of Dante's engagement with these poets, the book illuminates his careful departure from a dualistic model of love and conversion and shows his erotic commitment to be at the heart of his claims to pre-eminence as a vernacular author.

Composed at the end of the first century CE, Statius' Thebaid recounts the civil war in Thebes between the two sons of Oedipus, Polynices and Eteocles, and the horrific events that take place on the battlefield. Its author, the Roman poet Statius, employed a wide variety of Greco-Roman sources in order to narrate the Argive expedition against Thebes and the fratricidal war. Book 8 opens with the descent of the Argive seer Amphiaraus to the Underworld through a chasm of the earth; the soldiers mourn their seer's loss and elect a successor, Thiodamas, who placates Earth (Tellus) through a prayer, before the opening of the second day of hostilities. The book reaches its climax when fierce Tydeus is mortally wounded and dies having committed an act of cannibalism by eating his opponent's brains; Minerva leaves the battlefield in disgust, taking away from her protege the intended gift of immortality. In this volume, Augoustakis presents the first full-length edition of Thebaid 8, with text and apparatus criticus, and an English translation. A detailed introduction discusses the Argive/Theban myth in the Greek and Roman literary tradition and art, as well as the reception of the book in subsequent centuries, especially in Dante's Divine Comedy. The accompanying commentary provides useful notes which explore questions of interpretation and Statius' language and literary craft, with particular emphasis on the exploitation of various Greek and Latin intertexts in Statius' poetry.

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.

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.