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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Poetry & poets > General
Consuming Keats explores the impact of John Keats on authors and
artists, from the poet's death in 1821 to the end of the First
World War. The study examines the work of authors including
Shelley, Browning, Wilde, Hardy and Thomas Hall Caine, as well as
the celebrated artists Holman Hunt, Millais and Rossetti, and other
lesser-known figures. The study also includes tributes to Keats by
women authors and artists, such as: Christina Rossetti, Alice
Meynell and Jessie Marion King. The interdisciplinary approach
provides a unique and comprehensive analysis of Keats's cultural
heritage.
The Robert Browning volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors
series is the first one-volume fully annotated edition of Browning
to offer a wide selection of work written throughout Browning's
career, from the very first poem he published, Pauline, to
Asolando, the volume that was published on the day that he died.
The text chosen is, wherever possible, the text of the poem as it
was first published by Browning himself, and as a consequence the
volume also constitutes a kind of biography. It reveals a poet who
began as a bold experimentalist, and who continued to experiment
throughout a writing career of more than fifty years. Browning is
best known for his dramatic monologues, and the dramatic monologues
are fully represented in this volume, but he was also a narrative
poet, a poet of philosophical reflection, and a poet who fashioned
an extraordinary variety of lyric measures. This volume reveals
Browning as a far more versatile poet than he is often taken to be.
There are two important prose items, an essay on Shelley and a
letter to Ruskin which clarify Browning's intellectual stance. The
Notes include brief headnotes to each poem followed by detailed
annotation. Browning is often a difficult poet, and the notes are
designed to assist the reader to arrive at a full understanding of
the poems. The volume also includes a general introduction and a
detailed chronology of Browning's life and times.
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.
Meng Haoran (689-740) was one of the most important poets of the
"High Tang" period, the greatest age of Chinese poetry. In his own
time he was famous for his poetry as well as for his distinctive
personality. This is the first complete translation into any
language of all his extant poetry. Includes original Chinese texts
and English translation on facing pages.
Ted Hughes wrote in a wide range of modes which were informed by an
even wider range of contexts to which his lifetime's reading,
interests and experience gave him access. The achievement of Ted
Hughes as one of the major poets of the twentieth century is
complimented by his growing reputation as a writer of letters,
plays, literary criticism and translations. In addition, Hughes
made important contributions to education, literary history,
emergent environmentalism and debates about life writing. Ted
Hughes in Context brings together thirty-four contributors who
inform new readings of the works, and conceptualize Hughes's work
within long-standing critical traditions while acknowledging a new
awareness of his future importance. This collection offers
consideration not only of the most important aspects of Hughes's
work, but also the most neglected.
Conceived in 1976 and published in 1980, LEGEND exemplifies the
political and linguistic commitments of then-nascent Language
writing. Coauthored by Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray
DiPalma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman, the work was composed
on typewriters and developed through the mail. The twenty-six poems
of the volume bring together every possible permutation of
collaborative authorship in one-, two-, three-, and five-author
combinations, revealing the evolution of distinctive styles against
and in conversation with others. Along with a complete reproduction
of the original text, LEGEND: The Complete Facsimile in Context
includes a critical introduction by editors Matthew Hofer and
Michael Golston, a generous selection of material from the authors'
correspondence, and a new collaborative piece by the authors. This
book will be an essential resource to students and scholars in
twentieth-century poetry and poetics.
For more than ninety years, eager writers and young poets, even
those simply looking for a purpose in life, have embraced the
wisdom of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, first
published in 1929. Most readers and scholars assumed that the
letters from young poet were forever lost to posterity. Yet,
shockingly, the letters were recently discovered by Erich Unglaub,
a Rilke scholar, and published in German in 2019. The acclaimed
translator Damion Searls has now not only retranslated Rilke's
original letters but also translated the letters by Franz Xaver
Kappus, an Austrian military cadet and aspiring poet. This timeless
edition, in addition to joining the two sets of letters together
for the first time in English, provides a new window into the
workings of Rilke's visionary poetic and philosophical mind,
allowing us to re-experience the literary genius of one of the most
inspiring works of twentieth-century literature.
The poet of the Odyssey was a seriously flawed genius. He had a
wonderfully inventive imagination, a gift for pictorial detail and
for introducing naturalistic elements into epic dialogue, and a
grand architectural plan for the poem. He was also a slapdash
artist, often copying verses from the Iliad or from himself without
close attention to their suitability. With various possible ways of
telling the story bubbling up in his mind, he creates a narrative
marked by constant inconsistency of detail. He is a fluent composer
who delights in prolonging his tale with subsidiary episodes, yet
his deployment of the epic language is often inept and sometimes
simply unintelligible. The Making of the Odyssey is a penetrating
study of the background, composition, and artistry of the Homeric
Odyssey. Martin West places the poem in its late seventh-century
context in relation to the Iliad and other poetry of the time. He
also investigates the traditions that lie behind it: the origins of
the figure of Odysseus, and folk tales such as those of the
One-eyed Ogre and the Husband's Return.
"Historicizing Blake" puts Blake back into the cultural context of
his times. These essays by both established and younger scholars
re-address Blake's contemporary milieu after the neglect of ten
years of post-structuralist, reader-orientated, methodology. By
employing notions of history wider than the purely 'literary', and
featuring an important new essay by the period's foremost
subcultural historian, lain McCalman, "Historicizing Blake"
represents a significant contribution towards the re-historicizing
of Romanticism.
In the mid-eleventh century, secular Byzantine poetry attained a
hitherto unseen degree of wit, vividness, and personal involvement,
chiefly exemplified in the poetry of Christophoros Mitylenaios,
Ioannes Mauropous, and Michael Psellos. This is the first volume to
consider this poetic activity as a whole, critically reconsidering
modern assumptions about Byzantine poetry, and focusing on
Byzantine conceptions of the role of poetry in society. By
providing a detailed account of the various media through which
poetry was presented to its readers, and by tracing the initial
circulation of poems, this volume takes an interest in the
Byzantine reader and his/her reading habits and strategies,
allowing aspects of performance and visual representation, rarely
addressed, to come to the fore. It also examines the social
interests that motivated the composition of poetry, establishing a
connection with the extraordinary social mobility of the time.
Self-representative strategies are analyzed against the background
of an unstable elite struggling to find moral justification, which
allows the study to raise the question of patronage, examine the
discourse used by poets to secure material rewards, and explain the
social dynamics of dedicatory epigrams. Finally, gift exchange is
explored as a medium that underlines the value of poetry and
confirms the exclusive nature of intellectual friendship.
This edited collection explores the work of highly awarded and
twice American Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin. Spanning Merwin's early
career, his mid-career success, his Hawaiian epic, his eco-poetry,
his lesser-known later poetry and the influence of Buddhism on his
work, the volume offers new perspectives on Merwin as a major poet.
Exploring his works across the twentieth and twenty-first century,
this collection presents Merwin as a necessary and contemporary
poet. It emphasizes contemporary readings of Merwin as an
environmental advocate, showing how his poetry seeks to help each
reader re-establish an intimate relationship with the natural
world. It also highlights how Merwin's work presents our place in
history as a pivotal moment of transition into a new era of
international cooperation. This volume both celebrates his life and
writing and takes scholarship on his work forward into the new
century.
This anthology is a new reading of the contemporary poetries. The
largest challenge facing Liberal Arts and Sciences today is how to
deal with the rapidly changing and increasingly complex world that
all the phenomena under the label globalization have created. This
world is 'multi'- many things: cultural, linguistic, ethnic,
racial, etc. Over the last few decades, on a daily basis, some 'we'
or another has found itself face to face with not the other but
with many others, with not one language practice, but many.
Educating for this world is the most pressing challenge we face.
The raison d'etre for Poetry and Pedagogy is the belief that poetry
is the linguistic laboratory of the times in which one lives. It is
the genre in which our habitual language practices are daily
stretched, challenged and reconfigured. The collection gathers
together the work of a number of scholars, poets, and teachers on
the challenges and productive possibilities that arise when
teaching contemporary writing.
Pastoralist traditions have long been extraordinarily important to
the social, economic, political, and cultural life of the
region of western India called Maharashtra. The Marathi-language
oral literature of the Dhangar shepherds of
Maharashtra is not only one of the most important elements of their
own traditional cultural life, but also a treasure of
world literature. This volume presents two lively and well-crafted
examples of the ovi, a genre typical of the oral literature of
Dhangars. The two ovis in the volume narrate the stories of Biroba
and Dhuloba, two of the most important gods of Dhangar shepherds.
Each of the ovis tells an elaborate story of the birth of the
god--a miraculous and complicated process in both cases--and of the
struggles each one goes through in order to find and win his bride.
The extensive introduction provides a literary analysis of the ovis
and discusses what they reveal about the cosmology, geography,
society, administrative structures, and economy of their
performers' world, and about the performers views of
pastoralistsand women.
Yeats's Poetry and Poetics brings together some of the finest Yeats
criticism ever published, together with some new pieces specially
written for this volume. Spanning the whole of Yeats's career, the
essays are organised into three main parts. The first deals with
Yeats's concern with the speaking voice and its bearing on public
and private readings of his verse; and on hisuse of certain kinds
of images in his poetry and plays, from ghosts and fairies, to
figures borrowed from painters and sculptors and, extraordinarily,
to the actual dancer for whom he makes room in his work. The second
section puts Yeats's poetry in context with the work of Synge, D.H.
Lawrence, Walter de la Mare and other 'Georgians', and with that of
T.S. Eliot and other modernists; assessing the continuities (real
and asserted) in Yeats's long poetic career against the revolutions
in the poetry of his time. The profound connections between the
writings of Yeats and Joyce, including the coupling of Finnegans's
Wake and 'The Wanderings of Oisin' are also examined. Rounding off
the volume 'Phantasmagoria', explores the implications for his
poetics of Yeats's spiritualist philosophy, especially in terms of
his co
In Dickinson Unbound, Alexandra Socarides takes readers on a
journey through the actual steps and stages of Emily Dickinson's
creative process. In chapters that deftly balance attention to
manuscripts, readings of poems, and a consideration of literary and
material culture, Socarides takes up each of the five major stages
of Dickinson's writing career: copying poems onto folded sheets of
stationery; inserting and embedding poems into correspondence;
sewing sheets together to make fascicles; scattering loose sheets;
and copying lines on often torn and discarded pieces of household
paper. In so doing, Socarides reveals a Dickinsonian poetics
starkly different from those regularly narrated by literary
history. Here, Dickinson is transformed from an elusive poetic
genius whose poems we have interpreted in a vacuum into an author
who employed surprising (and, at times, surprisingly conventional)
methods to wholly new effect. Dickinson Unbound gives us a
Dickinson at once more accessible and more complex than previously
imagined. As the first authoritative study of Dickinson's material
and compositional methods, this book not only transforms our ways
of reading Dickinson, but advocates for a critical methodology that
insists on the study of manuscripts, composition, and material
culture for poetry of the nineteenth century and thereafter.
The presentation of Tennyson's personal and poetic development is
supplemented by an introduction, brief biographical sketches of
more than 30 of his friends, and maps of relevant areas in
Lincolnshire and the Isle of Wight.
This intimate portrayal of the friendship between two icons of
twentieth-century poetry, Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky,
highlights the parallel lives of the poets as exiles living in
America and Nobel Prize laureates in literature. To create this
truly original work, Irena Grudzinska Gross draws from poems,
essays, letters, interviews, speeches, lectures, and her own
personal memories as a confidant of both Milosz and Brodsky. The
dual portrait of these poets and the elucidation of their attitudes
toward religion, history, memory, and language throw a new light on
the upheavals of the twentieth-century. Gross also incorporates
notes on both poets' relationships to other key literary figures,
such as W. H. Auden, Susan Sontag, Seamus Heaney, Mark Strand,
Robert Haas, and Derek Walcott.
The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture
explores the resurgent interest in literary form and aesthetics in
early modern english studies. Essays by leading international
scholars reflect on the legacy of historicist approaches and on
calls for a renewal of formalist analysis as both a tool and as a
defence of our object of study as literary critics. This collection
addresses the possibilities as well as the challenges of combining
these critical traditions; it tests and reflects on these through
practice. It also establishes new lines of enquiry by expanding
definitions of form to include the material as well as theoretical
implications of the term and explores the early modern roots of
these connections. The period's most famous poets such as Sidney,
Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Jonson appear alongside Anne
Southwell, Thomas Campion, and many anonymous poets and
songwriters. The Work of Form brings together contributors from
literary history, historicism, manuscript study, prosodic theory,
the history of music, history of the book, as well as print and
manuscript culture. It represents avowedly political historical
work, alongside aesthetic and theoretical frameworks, work bridging
literature and music, and cognitive poetics. In bringing together
these diverse commitments, it addresses urgent questions about how
we can understand and analyse literary form in a
historically-rooted way, and demands rigorous discussion about the
status of formal and aesthetic considerations in editing, in
literary criticism, and in teaching.
Robert Herrick has long been one of the best loved of English lyric
poets. Known through the centuries as the author of 'Gather ye
rosebuds', he also wrote, as this new edition shows, hundreds of
songs, epigrams and longer poems equally worthy of attention.
Volume I of this new edition of Herrick's work contains Hesperides,
Herrick's only published collection. As well as the commentary on
Hesperides, volume II contains the fifty-nine surviving manuscript
poems which can be firmly attributed to Herrick, and on which his
reputation was based before 1648. It is an ambitious and original
attempt to recover for the first time the history of Herrick's
corpus of manuscript poetry, and to identify how his poems
circulated, and who his copyists and readers were. By establishing
the type of sources to which they had access and the nature and
quality of the poems these sources contained, and through the
histories of transmission that accompany every poem, this volume
offers a significant body of evidence that deepens our critical
understanding not only of Herrick's poetry, but of the mechanics of
scribal publication and the culture of reading, writing and
performing poetry and music in early modern England. Where, as is
often the case, a musical setting survives this is also printed,
along with a commentary on the setting, in a form which is designed
to encourage the performance of the lyrics.
For the first time in scholarship, this essay collection interprets
modernity through the literary micro-genres of the aphorism, the
epigram, the maxim, and the fragment. Situating Friedrich Nietzsche
and Oscar Wilde as forerunners of modern aphoristic culture, the
collection analyses the relationship between aphoristic
consciousness and literary modernism in the expanded purview of the
long twentieth century, through the work of a wide range of
authors, including Samuel Beckett, Max Beerbohm, Jorge Luis Borges,
Katherine Mansfield, and Stevie Smith. From the romantic fragment
to the tweet, Aphoristic Modernity offers a compelling exploration
of the short form's pervasive presence both as a standalone
artefact and as part of a larger textual and cultural matrix.
The Bible serves Wordsworth as a basis for his poetry and poetics, providing language, images, figures, and importantly, a paradigm of poetic genres. Working from three interrelated critical approaches--intertextuality, poetics, and metaphysics--Deeanne Westbrook first analyzes Wordsworth’s theory and practice as these reflect the New Testament doctrine of the Incarnation. Subsequent chapters consider Wordsworth’s adaptation of biblical narrative forms--etymological tales, parables, and mystical allegories. Closing chapters examine some extraordinary linguistic innovations in Wordsworth’s revisions of biblical apocalypse, techniques that permit the poet to express the ineffable and to reveal nothing.
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