"Shakespeare, Spencer and the Matter of Britain" examines the work of two of the most important English Renaissance authors in terms of the cultural, social and political contexts of early modern Britain. Andrew Hadfield demonstrates that the poetry of Edmund Spenser and the plays of William Shakespeare demand to be read in terms of an expanding Elizabethan and Jacobean culture in which a dominant English identity had to come to terms with the Irish, Scots and Welsh who were now also subjects of the crown.

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.

"King Lear" is believed by many feminists to be irretrievably sexist. Through detailed line readings supported by a wealth of critical commentary, "Re-Visioning Lear's Daughters" reconceives Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia as full characters, not stereotypes of good and evil. These new feminist interpretations are tested with specific renderings, placing the reader in precise theatrical moments. Through multiple representations, this unique approach demonstrates the elasticity of Shakespeare's text.

This book offers fresh critical interpretation of two of the central tenets of Irish culture - migration and memory. From its starting point with the 'New Irish' generation of poets in the United States during the 1980s and concluding with the technological innovations of 21st-century poetry, this study spans continents, generations, genders and sexualities to reconsider the role of memory and of migration in the work of a range of contemporary Irish poets. Combining sensitive close readings and textual analysis with thorough theoretical application, it sets out the formal, thematic, socio-cultural and literary contexts of migration as an essential aspect of Irish literature. This book is essential reading for literary critics, academics, cultural commentators and students with an interest in contemporary poetry, Irish studies, diaspora studies and memory studies.

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.

Die bundel, wat in P.J. Philander se nege-en-tagtigste jaar verskyn het, is geskryf terwyl hy in New York gewoon het. Ten spyte van die afstand tussen die digter en sy geboorteland, spreek die gedigte in die bundel steeds van 'n intieme verbintenis tussen hom en sy land van herkoms. In die middel van die winter word Miem Fischer saam met haar enigste seun en ander familielede weggevoer van hulle plaas naby Ermelo: eers na die konsentrasiekamp by Standerton en daarna na die kamp by Merebank naby Durban. In haar dagboekinskrywings ontvou dag na dag die aangrypende verhaal van hoe sy die haglike realiteit van lewe in ’n konsentrasiekamp moet verduur. Tant Miem Fischer se kampdagboek is een van maar ’n handjievol dagboeke wat die lyding van Boerevroue en -kinders van dag tot dag weergee en wat na die oorlog behoue gebly het.

This is the first edition for fifty years of one of the greatest of English lyric poets. Volume I concentrates on Herrick's large printed collection, Hesperides, published in 1648, and the product of nearly four decades of writing. The text is based on a collation of all fifty-seven known surviving copies of Hesperides. In addition it includes a much needed new biography, covering the suicide of his father, his apprenticeship as a goldsmith-banker, and his subsequent career in Cambridge, London, and Devon. It provides a survey of Herrick's fluctuating critical reputation-from 'the first in rank and station of English song-writers' to 'trivially charming'-and a detailed reconstruction of the original printing and publishing, just after the first Civil War, of a book which was the first 'Complete Works' to be published by an English poet. There is also a newly ordered sequence of Herrick's letters from Cambridge, his only surviving prose. An extensive commentary on Hesperides is placed in Volume II so that readers can use it side by side with the poems if they wish. The commentary gives new translations of Herrick's hundreds of classical allusions, and quotes his equally numerous Biblical ones, both of them far more extensive, and frequently far more playful, than has hitherto been realised. It also notes many parallels between Herrick's work and that of contemporaries, especially Jonson, Shakespeare, Burton, and John Fletcher, and his habit of echoing or quoting himself, a tendency which reinforces the strong sense of Herrick's persona dominating the collection. Full explanations are given of contemporary personal, political, and cultural references.

Walter of Chatillon was one of the leading Medieval Latin poets, who flourished at the high point of Medieval Latin literature - the later twelfth century. This volume presents the Latin text and facing English translation of Walter's shorter poems, including love poems, satires, and (largely Christmas) hymns. His satirical poems, often written in Goliardic hexameters, of which he was an accomplished master, are fine examples of the form. The allusiveness of his hymns makes them often notoriously difficult, but they provide a fascinating insight into the mindset of the clergy of the time and the prevalence of allegorical interpretation of the Bible. This volume provides an outline of the author's life, and adds a further fifteen poems to the previously accepted canon of fifty-two poems which appear in earlier editions of Walter of Chatillon's poetry. The introduction discusses the attribution of the additional poems, Walter's use of rhythmical and metrical verse in these poems, the relevant manuscripts, the recurring themes of the Feast of Fools, and avarice and largesse, and the arrangement of the poems. This volume makes available in English for the first time the shorter poems of an important medieval poet together with an improved Latin text. Scholars of the twelfth century will find a great deal of primary evidence on a wide variety of social and religious issues now accessible to them.

This volume addresses the global reception of "untranslatable" concrete poetry. Featuring contributions from an international group of literary and translation scholars and practitioners, working across a variety of languages, the book views the development of the international concrete poetry movement through the lens of "transcreation", that is, the informed, creative response to the translation of playful, enigmatic, visual texts. Contributions range in subject matter from ancient Greek and Chinese pattern poems to modernist concrete poems from the Americas, Europe and Asia. This challenging body of experimental work offers creative challenges and opportunities to literary translators and unique pleasures to the sympathetic reader. Highlighting the ways in which literary influence is mapped across languages and borders, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of experimental poetry, translation studies and comparative literature.

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 lively student compendium presents a comprehensive selection of the key critical views of Chaucer in the twentieth century. Stimulating introductions and editorial comment enable students to enter into dialogue with critical opinion, and thereby with Chaucer's writings, whilst the juxtaposition of past and present criticism equips them with a sense of historical perspective.

A preliminary chapter addresses the growth of Chaucer criticism over the centuries, and the main developments of the twentieth century, incorporating a range of brief extracts. The structure of the volume then reflects the three major divisions of Chaucer's writing:
The Dream Vision poetry
Troilus and Criseyde
The Canterbury Tales

Linking discussions introduce the main themes and critical issues of these works. Each section then presents different seminal approaches. For the "Canterbury Tales," for example, students can chart their paths through early allegorical readings, iconographic studies, New Historical approaches, and gender theory. In this way, the volume furnishes the reader with a broader critical repertoire and encourages independence of thought, but also offers a unified discussion of Chaucer's work.

This Norton Critical Edition includes: Emily Wilson's authoritative translation of Homer's masterpiece, accompanied by her informative introduction, explanatory footnotes and book-by-book summaries. Four maps, created especially for this translation. Contextual materials including sources and analogues by Homer, Sappho, Pindar and others. Also included are carefully chosen passages from (mainly) ancient texts that provide insight into The Odyssey and its reception by Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, Pseudo-Longinus, Lucian, Apollodorus, Heraclitus, Porphyry, Proclus, Hyginus, Dante Alighieri, Alfred Lord Tennyson, C. P. Cavafy, Derek Walcott and Margaret Atwood. Nine critical essays addressing key topics-composition; representation of religion and the gods; class and slavery; gender; colonisation and the meaning of home; trickery, intelligence and lying; and more- essential to the study of The Odyssey. Essays by Robert Fowler, Laurel Fulkerson, Barbara Graziosi, Laura M. Slatkin, Sheila Murnaghan, Patrice Rankine, Helene P. Foley, Egbert J. Bakker and Lillian Eileen Doherty are included. A glossary and a list of suggested further readings. About the Series Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format-annotated text, contexts and criticism-helps students to better understand, analyse and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

Tomasz Garbol's book reconstructs Czeslaw Milosz's poetic vision of the world after the Fall. The entry point to this approach is the conviction about the ambivalence of previous interpretations of Milosz's works, especially about his bipolar poetic worldview (his intellectual and existential division between pessimism and ecstasy) and his understanding of the consequences of the Fall (reversible or fatalistic). The book is a literary studies take on the relationship between literature and religion. The main direction is that Milosz's main need in art comes from his yearning for contact with the meaning of reality, which he seeks in the activity of poetic imagination.

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.

Few poets have captured the imagination of the world like Seamus Heaney. Recognized as one of the truly outstanding poets of our time, Heaney's work is both critically acclaimed and popular with the general reader. It is taught in classrooms across the globe and has been translated into more than twenty-seven languages. Presenting original research from an international field of scholars, Seamus Heaney in Context offers new pathways to explore the places, times and influences that made Heaney a poet. Drawing on newly available archival and print sources, these essays situate Heaney in a multitude of contexts that help readers navigate received ideas about his life and work. In mapping intersecting themes in the current terrain of Heaney criticism, this study also signposts new directions for understanding Heaney's poetry in future contexts.

An illuminating new study of modern Polish verse in performance, offering a major reassessment of the roles of poets and poetry in twentieth-century Polish culture. What's in a voice? Why record oneself reading a poem that also exists on paper? In recent decades, scholars have sought to answer these questions, giving due credit to the art of poetry performance in the anglophone world. Now Aleksandra Kremer trains a sharp ear on modern Polish poetry, assessing the rising importance of authorial sound recordings during the tumultuous twentieth century in Eastern Europe. Kremer traces the adoption by key Polish poets of performance practices intimately tied to new media. In Polish hands, tape recording became something different from what it had been in the West, shaped by its distinctive origins behind the Iron Curtain. The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry reconstructs the historical conditions, audio technologies, and personal motivations that informed poetic performances by such luminaries as Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, Aleksander Wat, Zbigniew Herbert, Miron Bialoszewski, Anna Swir, and Tadeusz Rozewicz. Through performances both public and private, prepared and improvised, professional and amateur, these poets tested the possibilities of the physical voice and introduced new poetic practices, reading styles, and genres to the Polish literary scene. Recording became, for these artists, a means of announcing their ambiguous place between worlds. Kremer's is a work of criticism as well as recovery, deploying speech-analysis software to shed light on forgotten audio experiments-from poetic "sound postcards," to unusual home performances, to the final testaments of writer-performers. Collectively, their voices reveal new aesthetics of poetry reading and novel concepts of the poetic self.

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.

Elizabeth Vandiver examines the ways in which British poets of the First World War used classical literature, culture, and history as a source of images, ideas, and even phrases for their own poetry. Vandiver argues that classics was a crucial source for writers from a wide variety of backgrounds, from working-class poets to those educated in public schools, and for a wide variety of political positions and viewpoints. Poets used references to classics both to support and to oppose the war from its beginning all the way to the Armistice and after. By exploring the importance of classics in the poetry of the First World War, Vandiver offers a new perspective on that poetry and on the history of classics in British culture.

This book, by the eminent poetry critic Neil Corcoran, examines the ways in which the work of significant modern Irish, British and American poets interacts with or 'negotiates' different contexts - historical, social, political, artistic and aesthetic. In Part 1 important work by David Jones, Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney and Bob Dylan is shown to negotiate poetic methods - both traditional and modernist - and also the work of major earlier writers to produce strikingly original new forms; and Derek Mahon's prose is read in the light of these concerns. The books shows how, by negotiating in this way, their work engages profoundly with complex and sometimes terrible histories, including the First World War and the Northern Irish Troubles. Part 2 discusses the ways in which 'ekphrastic' work - poems which engage with visual art - by Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Graham, John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath and Ciaran Carson negotiates comparable poetic and historical inheritances while also inventively responding to work by significant artists, notably Parmigianino, Poussin, de Chirico, Klee and members of the St Ives School. The book is a signal contribution to current critical debates about these poets, situating them in original or newly clarified contexts, and it offers exemplary close readings of noteworthy poems.

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.

Readers of poetry make aesthetic judgements about verse. It is quite common to hear intuitive statements about poets' rhythms. It is said, for example, that Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet and 1987 Nobel Prize laureate, "sounds English" when he writes in Russian. Yet, it is far from clear what this statement means from a linguistic point of view. What is English about Brodsky's Russian poetry? And in what way are his "English" rhythms different from the verse of his Russian predecessors? The book provides an analysis of Brodsky's experiment bringing evidence from an unusually wide variety of disciplines and theories rarely combined in a single study, including the generative approach to meter; the Russian quantitative approach, analysis of readers' intuitions about poetic rhythm, analysis of the poet's source readings, as well as acoustic phonetics, statistics, and archival research. The distinct analytic approaches applied in this book to the same phenomenon complement one another each providing insight alternate approaches do not, and showing that only a combination of theories and methods allows us to fully appreciate what Brodsky's "English accent" really was, and what any poetic innovation means.

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.