In Building Natures, Julia Daniel establishes the influence of landscape architecture, city planning, and parks management on American poetry to show how modernists engaged with the green worlds and social playgrounds created by these new professions in the early twentieth century. The modern poets who capture these parks in verse explore the aesthetic principles and often failed democratic ideals embedded in the designers' verdant architectures. The poetry of Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore foregrounds the artistry behind our most iconic green spaces. At the same time, it demonstrates how parks framed, rather than ameliorated, civic anxieties about an increasingly diverse population living and working in dense, unhealthy urban centers. Through a combination of ecocriticism, urban studies, and historical geography, Building Natures unveils the neglected urban context for seemingly natural landscapes in several modernist poems, such as Moore's ""An Octopus"" and Stevens's Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, while contributing to the dismantling of the organic-mechanic divide in modernist studies and ecocriticism.

Composed in early thirteenth-century Iberia, the Libro de Alexandre was Spain's first vernacular version of the Romance of Alexander and the first poem in the corpus now known as the mester de clerecia. These learned works, written by clergy and connected with both school and court, were also tools for the articulation of sovereignty in an era of prolonged military and political expansion. In The Task of the Cleric, Simone Pinet considers the composition of the Libro de Alexandre in the context of cartography, political economy, and translation. Her discussion sheds light on how clerics perceived themselves and on the connections between literature and these other activities. Drawing on an extensive collection of early cartographic materials, much of it rarely considered in conjunction with the romance, Pinet offers an original and insightful view of the mester de clerecia and the changing role of knowledge and the clergy in thirteenth-century Iberia.

Despite the deep-seated notion that the archetypal American poet sings a solitary "Song of Myself," much of the most enduring American poetry has actually been preoccupied with friendship and its pleasures, contradictions, and discontents. Beautiful Enemies examines this obsession with the problems and paradoxes of friendship, tracing its eruption in the New American Poetry that emerges after the Second World War as a potent avant-garde movement. The book argues that a clash between friendship and nonconformity is central to postwar American poetry and its development. By focusing on of some of the most important and influential postmodernist American poets-the New York School poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and their close contemporary Amiri Baraka-the book offers a new interpretation of the peculiar dynamics of American avant-garde poetic communities and the role of the individual within them. At the same time, this study challenges both the reductive critiques of American individualism and the idealized, heavily biographical celebrations of literary camaraderie one finds in much critical discussion. Beautiful Enemies foregrounds a fundamental paradox: that at the heart of experimental American poetry pulses a commitment to individualism and dynamic movement that runs directly counter to an equally profound devotion to avant-garde collaboration and community. Delving into unmined archival evidence (including unpublished correspondence, poems, and drafts), the book demonstrates that this tense dialectic-between an aversion to conformity and a poetics of friendship-actually energizes postwar American poetry, drives the creation, meaning, and form of important poems, frames the interrelationships between certain key poets, and leaves contemporary writers with a complicated legacy to negotiate. Combining extensive readings of the poets with analysis of cultural, philosophical, and biographical contexts, Beautiful Enemies uncovers the collision between radical self-reliance and the siren call of the interpersonal at the core of twentieth-century American poetry

Stephen Scully both offers a reading of Hesiod's Theogony and traces the reception and shadows of this authoritative Greek creation story in Greek and Roman texts up to Milton's own creation myth, which sought to "soar above th' Aonian Mount [i.e., the Theogony] ... and justify the ways of God to men." Scully also considers the poem in light of Near Eastern creation stories, including the Enuma elish and Genesis, as well as the most striking of modern "scientific myths," Freud's Civilization and its Discontents. Scully reads Hesiod's poem as a hymn to Zeus and a city-state creation myth, arguing that Olympus is portrayed as an idealized polity and - with but one exception - a place of communal harmony. This reading informs his study of the Theogony's reception in later writings about polity, discord, and justice. The rich and various story of reception pays particular attention to the long Homeric Hymns, Solon, the Presocratics, Pindar, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Plato in the Archaic and Classical periods; to the Alexandrian scholars, Callimachus, Euhemerus, and the Stoics in the Hellenistic period; to Ovid, Apollodorus, Lucan, a few Church fathers, and the Neoplatonists in the Roman period. Tracing the poem's reception in the Byzantine, medieval, and early Renaissance, including Petrarch and Erasmus, the book ends with a lengthy exploration of Milton's imitations of the poem in Paradise Lost. Scully also compares what he considers Hesiod's artful interplay of narrative, genealogical lists, and keen use of personified abstractions in the Theogony to Homeric narrative techniques and treatment of epic verse.

Fleeing the ashes of Troy, Aeneas, Achilles' mighty foe in the Iliad, begins an incredible journey to fulfill his destiny as the founder of Rome. His voyage will take him through stormy seas, entangle him in a tragic love affair, and lure him into the world of the dead itself -- all the way tormented by the vengeful Juno, Queen of the Gods. Ultimately, he reaches the promised land of Italy where, after bloody battles and with high hopes, he founds what will become the Roman empire.

Anne Home Hunter (1741-1821) was one of the most successful song writers of the second half of the eighteenth century, most famously as the poet who wrote the lyrics of many of Haydn's songs. However her work, which included many more serious, lyrical and romantic poems has been largely forgotten. This book contains over 200 poems, some published in her life-time under her married name 'Mrs John Hunter', some attributed only to 'a Lady', and most importantly many transcribed from her manuscripts, housed in various archives and in a private collection, which are now collected for the first time. Hitherto Anne Hunter has been known almost entirely through her 'Poems' published in 1802, in her Introduction Isobel Armstrong argues that she saw this book as a definitive representation of her poetry. Besides her consummately skilful lyrics and songs it contains serious political odes and reflective poems. The unpublished material amplifies and extends the work of 1802. The introduction is followed by a long biographical essay by Caroline Grigson. The daughter of Robert Home, an impoverished Scottish Army surgeon, Anne Hunter spent her adult life in London where she married the famous anatomist John Hunter, with whom she lived in great style, latterly as a bluestocking hostess, until his death in 1793. The book includes many new details of her long life, her friendship with Angelica Kaufman (who painted her portrait - see cover) and the bluestocking, Elizabeth Carter. The account of Anne's life as a widow describes her relationships with her family, her niece the playwright Joanna Baillie, and her friends, especially those of the famous Minto family, as well as the Scottish impresario George Thomson. Of especial interest is the discovery of a previously unrecorded visit that Haydn made to her during his second London visit when she was living in Blackheath. Expertly researched which Grigson's book sets Anne Hunter's oeuvre in the political and social context of the time and will be required reading to scholars of literature and music alike.

Until quite recently, anthologies of English poetry contained very few poems by women, and histories of English poetry gave little space to women poets. How should poetry lovers respond? The book begins by suggesting four possible responses: the conservative, which claims that women have not written many good poems; individual recuperation, which salvages some fine poems by women but without altering the general view of English poetry; alternative canon, which claims that women do not write the same kind of poetry as men, so that their work should be judged by different standards; and cultural recuperation, which claims that women's poetry is a significant cultural phenomenon, and should be read and studied without subjecting it to any tests. All these positions can be defended, and this book has elements of them all. As the title indicates, this book is about reading women's poems, rather than forming theories about them: it explores the experience of reading Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Browning, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson and many others. Beginning with Katherine Philips, the first Englishwoman to achieve fame as a poet, it covers three centuries to the work of Marianne Moore and Stevie Smith, but does not include the many living women poets who deserve a volume to themselves. In order to discuss adequately the work of those included, it was necessary to omit many other women poets: the selection has been made on merit, and to readers who miss some of their favourite poets the only answer can be that the book does nothing to discourage reading other poets. Indeed, it is hoped that the form of discussion of the selected poems will be helpful in engaging further with women poets of all calibres. Do women write differently from men? The author assumes no predetermined answer but is very willing to ask the question; and in order to do so he frequently compares poems by women with poems by men, not so much to ask who writes better as to explore similarities and differences: thus Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is discussed along with Alexander Pope, Emily Dickinson along with Gerard Manly Hopkins and Elizabeth Browning along with her husband. Poems by women should be read, enjoyed, and argued about. They can be related to the time they were written and first admired, or to our views on women's history, or to our expectations of what poetry can offer -- but above all they should be enjoyed. And that is the faith in which this book is written.

Traditional accounts of Romantic and nineteenth-century poetry, have depicted John Clare as a peripheral figure, an 'original genius' whose talents set him apart from the mainstream of contemporary literary culture. But in recent years there has been a major shift of direction in Clare studies. Jonathan Bate, Zachary Leader and others have helped to show that Clare, far from being an isolated genius, was deeply involved in the rich cultural life both of his village and the metropolis. This study takes impetus from this new critical direction, offering an account of his poems as they relate to the literary culture of his day, and to literary history as it was being constructed in the early nineteenth century. Gorji defines a literary historical context in which Clare's poetry can best be understood, paying particular attention to questions of language and style. Rather than situating Clare in relation to Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, John Clare and the Place of Poetry considers his poetry in relation to eighteenth-century traditions as they persisted and developed in the Romantic period. This timely book is for scholars and students of Clare and eighteenth and nineteenth century poetry, but it should also appeal to the expanding audience for John Clare's work in the UK and USA.

Ovid's rarely studied Ibis is an elegiac companion-piece to the Tristia and Ex Ponto written after his banishment to the Black Sea in AD 8. Modelled on a poem of the same name by the Hellenistic poet Callimachus, Ibis stands out as an artistically contrived explosion of vitriol against an unnamed enemy who is characterised in terms of the Egyptian bird with its unprepossessing habits. Based in a tradition of curse-ritual, it is the most difficult of Ovid's poems to penetrate. Robinson Ellis's edition remains an indispensable - if typically eccentric - platform for the study of the poem's obscurities. Indeed Ellis deserves the primary credit for bringing Ibis back from obscurity into the light of day.This reissue of Ellis's 1881 edition includes a new introduction by Gareth Williams setting the edition in the context of earlier and later developments in scholarship. Ellis's edition not only made a significant contribution to research into the Ibis, it is an important representative of a particular vein of scholarship prevalent in nineteenth-century Latin study.

An exploration of the burgeoning field of Anglophone Asian diaspora poetry, this book draws on the thematic concerns of Hong Kong, Asian-American and British Asian poets from the wider Chinese or East Asian diasporic culture to offer a transnational understanding of the complex notions of home, displacement and race in a globalised world. Located within current discourse surrounding Asian poetry, postcolonial and migrant writing, and bridging the fields of literary and cultural criticism with author interviews, this book provides close readings on established and emerging Chinese diasporic poets' work by incorporating the writers' own reflections on their craft through interviews with some of those featured. In doing so, Jennifer Wong explores the usefulness and limitations of existing labels and categories in reading the works of selected poets from specific racial, socio-cultural, linguistic environments and gender backgrounds, including Bei Dao, Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, Hannah Lowe and Sarah Howe, Nina Mingya Powles and Mary Jean Chan. Incorporating scholarship from both the East and the West, Wong demonstrates how these poets' experimentation with poetic language and forms serve to challenge the changing notions of homeland, family, history and identity, offering new evaluations of contemporary diasporic voices.