Current norms of literary criticism tend to ignore ways in which literary experiences relate to life experience, and some ways in which literary experiences can be intensified and deepened. In this vibrant and controversial book, David Fuller seeks to recover the life in Shakespeare's sonnets, arguing that feeling and emotion, often ignored in criticism, should be central. He offers two ways of attempting this - first engaging with the poems through kinds of feeling fundamental to the young man sequence as presented in other kinds of writing and art - philosophy (Plato), poetry and visual art (Michelangelo), fiction (Mann), music (Britten), and film (Jarman). He then discusses reading the poems aloud, showing that dwelling in the words without translating them into other terms brings out their beauty and expressivity, and leads to fuller understanding of their form, structure, and meaning.

Building on the formula of York Notes, this series introduces students to more sophisticated analysis and wider critical perspectives. This enbables students to appreciate contrasting interpretations of the text and to develop critical thinking. This text covers The Aeneid by Virgil.

This complete scholarly edition of the poems of Jones Very (1813-80) provides the requisite materials for a major reappraisal of his work and standing among the significant figures of American Transcendentalism. Collecting 862 poems, the volume makes available for the first time all of Very's known poems, including much previously unpublished or uncollected material. Very, a New England Transcendentalist and a protege of Ralph Waldo Emerson, is one of the underrated American poets of the nineteenth century. Though he attracted a select audience in his day, serious study of Very's work in this century has been hampered by the lack of a complete, convenient, and reliable edition of his poetry. Perhaps even more discouraging to readers of older collections of Very's poems has been the puzzling variance in the style and quality of the verse. This edition, in which the poems are dated and chronologically arranged, reveals the three stages of Very's poetic development, out of which the distinctive genius of the second period clearly emerges. Written under the influence of a powerful psychological/spiritual experience, the ecstatic utterances of this period are by turns breathless in their intensity and tranquil in their serene contentment. This complete edition presents a critical, unmodernized, clear-text version of each poem, reflecting as nearly as possible the author's final intention. A textual introduction outlines editorial procedures and problems, and a general introduction places Very among his contemporaries, discusses the mystical experience that transformed his life and poetry, reviews the major related criticism, and assesses his poetic achievements. Historical notes and a full textual apparatus complete the edition.

In this set of thorough and revisionary readings of Percy Bysshe Shelley's best-known writings in verse and prose, Hogle argues that the logic and style in all these works are governed by a movement in every thought, memory, image, or word-pattern whereby each is seen and sees itself in terms of a radically different form. For any specified entity or figure to be known for "what it is," it must be reconfigured by and in terms of another one at another level (which must then be dislocated itself). In so delineating Shelley's "process," Hogle reveals the revisionary procedure in the poet's various texts and demonstrates the powerful effects of "radical transference" in Shelley's visions of human possibility.

Ezra Pound transformed his style of poetry when he wrote The Adams Cantos in the 1920s. But what caused him to rethink his earlier writing techniques? Grounded in archival material, this study explores the extent to which Pound's poetry changed in response to his reading of 17th-century American History and the social climate of the pre-war period. Drawing on the Ezra Pound papers, David Ten Eyck documents the changes to Pound's documentary techniques, establishing a chronology of the composition of The Cantos. His close readings of specific passages, set against the interwar years, allow Ten Eyck to gain insights into Pound's 1930s political and social criticism. Through references to the annotated copy of The Works of John Adams, he explores Pound's engagement with Adams at the expense of Thomas Jefferson: a figure formally at the heart of his previous work. Ultimately, this contextual and archival study uses John Adams and America to unlock the fascist beliefs and the later poetry of Ezra Pound.

A beautiful and inspiring collection of poetry by Maya Angelou, author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS and 'a brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman' (BARACK OBAMA). 'I write about being a Black American woman, however, I am always talking about what it's like to be a human being. This is how we are, what makes us laugh, and this is how we fall and how we somehow, amazingly, stand up again' Maya Angelou Maya Angelou's poetry - lyrical and dramatic, exuberant and playful - speaks of love, longing, partings; of Saturday night partying, and the smells and sounds of Southern cities; of freedom and shattered dreams. 'Her poetry is just as much a part of her autobiography as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and the volumes that follow.' Kirkus 'It is true poetry she is writing . . . it has an innate purity about it, unquenchable dignity' M. F. K. Fisher

'York Notes Advanced' offer an accessible approach to English Literature. This series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, 'York Notes Advanced' introduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

Almost a half century after his death in 1953, the Welsh author Dylan Thomas continues to capture the attention of scholars and critics. Though he attained some measure of fame before he died, he never enjoyed financial prosperity. His life was plagued with difficulties of all kinds, and he was only 39 years old at the time of his death. Some of his works, such as "Fern Hill" and "Do not go gentle into that good night" are frequently included in anthologies, and Thomas is now often considered one of the most important and original poets of the 20th century. During his trips to the United States, he read his works to large audiences on college campuses. He also made a number of radio broadcasts and recordings, and his moving voice made scores of listeners respond emotionally to his poems. Though Dylan Thomas has earned his place in literary history, readers often find his poems difficult to understand. This reference book is a valuable guide to his life and work. Because his writings are so very much a product of his troubled life, the volume begins with an insightful biography that provides a context for understanding Thomas's works. The second section then systematically overviews his works. While his poems receive much attention, the section also includes discussions of his prose works, his filmscripts, and his broadcasts. A third section then surveys the critical and scholarly response to his writings, with separate chapters detailing his reception in Wales, England, and North America. A selected bibliography lists editions of Thomas's works, along with the most important general studies of his writings.

The Language of Atoms argues that ancient Epicurean writing on language offers a theory of performative language. Such a theory describes how languages acts, providing psychic therapy or creating new verbal meanings, rather than passively describing the nature of the universe. This observation allows us new insight into how Lucretius, our primary surviving Epicurean author, uses language in his great poem, De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things). The book begins with a double contention: on the one hand, while scholarship on Lucretius has looked to connect Lucretius' text to its larger cultural and historical context, it has never turned to speech act theory in this quest. This omission is striking at least in so far as speech act theory was developed precisely as a way of locating language (including texts) within a theory of action. The book studies Lucretius' work in the light of performative language, looking at promising, acts of naming, and the larger political implications of these linguistic acts. The Language of Atoms locates itself at the intersection of both older scholarly work on Epicureanism and recent developments on the reception history, and will thus offer scholars across the humanities a challenging new perspective on Lucretius' work.

"Reader's Guides" provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works. Each guide also offers students fresh critical insights and provides a practical introduction to close reading and to analysing literary language and form. They provide up-to-date, authoritative but accessible guides to the most commonly studied classic texts. William Blake is a romantic poet who remains popular today, in part because his exceptional insight into psychological, political and social issues remains powerfully relevant. The "Reader's Guide" begins by introducing Blake's major themes including religious, political and social issues and then moves on to reading key works, including "Songs of Innocence and Experience" and "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell". It offers an invaluable introduction to reading Blake's poetry and includes sections on its contexts, language and style, critical reception and adaptation and influence and finally, an annotated guide to further reading.

Matthew Rowlinson proposes a revitalized and properly analytic formalism as the appropriate model for a reading of Tennyson. In a series of attentive close readings, he probes the nature of place and the structuring of desire in Tennyson's work. Focusing on the poet's most important early writings - fragments and poems produced between 1824 and 1833 - Rowlinson conflates deconstructive theory with psychoanalytic insights. The author begins by observing that the subjectivities articulated in these poems, from the strangely passive poet-seer of the ""Armageddon"" fragments to the embowered singers of ""Mariana,"" ""The Lady of Shalott,"" and ""The Hesperides"" to the absconding monarch of ""Ulysses,"" are all constituted in relation to ruined, abandoned, or inaccessible places. The placing of the subject allegorizes its relation to the signifier as well as to the discursive structures within which the signifier comes into being. On this premise, Rowlinson takes up Lacan's claim that it is through the signifier that it is through the signifier that all human desire is mediated. In the placement of the subjects he reads a distinctively Tennysonian articulation of desire. Following Paul de Man, Rowlinson demonstrates that allegory comes into being only with a structure of repetition. He has developed a formalist poetics that provides a psychoanalytic account of the most basic figurative and formal devices - allegory, metaphor, rhyme, and metre - and he offers an explication and critique of major concepts in Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalytic theory, including the gaze, the castration complex, the death drive, and the compulsion to repeat. By returning to the deconstruction, the author has resumed the challenges English studies took up in the 1970s and left incomplete in its rush to historicism. His readings offer fresh insights at the level of theory.

Examining poetry by Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, and Amiri Baraka, among others, this book shows that leading US poets since 1979 have performed the role of public intellectual through their poetic rhetoric. Gwiazda's argument aims to revitalize the role of poetry and its social value within an era of global politics.

Building on the formula of York Notes, this Advanced series introduces students to more sophisticated analysis and wider critical perspectives. The notes enable students to appreciate contrasting interpretations of the text and to develop their own critical thinking. Key features include: study methods; an introduction to the text; summaries with critical notes; themes and techniques; textual analysis of key passages; author biography; historical and literary background; modern and historical critical approaches; chronology; and glossary of literary terms.

This is the first critical edition of the twelfth-century Latin epic poem, Historia Vie Hierosolimitane, in an authoritative Oxford Medieval Texts edition, with facing-page text and translation and detailed introduction and notes.

This Reader's Guide charts the reception history of Ted Hughes' poetry from his first to last published collection, culminating in posthumous tributes and assessments of his lifetime achievement. Sandie Byrne explores the criticism relating to key issues such as nature, myth, the Laureateship, and Hughes' relationship with Sylvia Plath.

In this introduction to the life and works of John Keats, originally published in 1981, William Walsh presents a comprehensive but approachable study which illuminates first the poems, indirectly the man, and more obliquely the period. Working within a biographical framework, the author looks at Keats from the point of view of the development of his art and sensibility, examining all the major poems and relating them to the letters; reference is made throughout the book to the best contemporary critical writing on the subject and a select bibliography is provided.

This book is the result of investiging whether Ode to a Nightingale could be interpreted as the record of an actual song that moved Keats so deeply as to involve, in Jung's terms, an experience of the Self. . It is in effect a biographical study of one aspect of Keats' life of the imagination. It suggests why he became a poet, shows how his attitude to his poetry changed, how in Jungian terms he first met his 'shadow', rejected it, then came to accept it, and how this affected his poetry. The meaning of the few psychological terms used in the book are clarified by illustration from Keats' own writing, thus contributing to its understanding at the same time. An intimate relationship between his letters and the poems is shown. First published in 1964, the study throws light on well-worn themes such as what Keats meant by beauty, his theory of 'negative capability', why he abandoned Hyperion. It gives a fresh interpretation of Endymion and of aspects of the two versions of Hyperion, Lamia, The Eve of St Agnes, and the other great odes. Among details is has something to say on why La Belle Dame kissed her knight precisely four times.

This study should be of interest to the scholar and aficionado alike. It uncovers a thematic unity within Blake's early work: his far reaching use of humour. Although often dismissed as a product of his eccentricity, the author argues the comic was an essential key to Blake's concept of Vision. With special reference to Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, this book offers new readings of many of Blake's works, demonstrating how he was influenced by contemporary theatre, verbal and visual satirists and the Shakespearean clown.

The recovery of Dante's metaphysics - which are very different from our own - is essential, argues Christian Moevs, if we are to resolve what has been called "the central problem in the interpretation of the Comedy." That problem is what to make of the Comedy's claim to the status of revelation, vision, or experiential record - as something more than imaginative literature. In this book Moevs offers the first sustained treatment of the metaphysical picture that grounds and motivates the Comedy, and the relation between those metaphysics and Dante's poetics. Moevs arrives at the radical conclusion that Dante believed that all of what we perceive as reality, the spatio-temporal world, is in fact a creation or projection of conscious being. Armed with this new understanding, Moevs is able to shed light on a series of perennial issues in the interpretation of the Comedy.

In the most comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the poetry published in Britain between the Restoration and the end of the eighteenth century, forty-four authorities from six countries survey the poetry of the age in all its richness and diversity-serious and satirical, public and private, by men and women, nobles and peasants, whether published in deluxe editions or sung on the streets. The contributors discuss poems in social contexts, poetic identities, poetic subjects, poetic form, poetic genres, poetic devices, and criticism. Even experts in eighteenth-century poetry will see familiar poems from new angles, and all readers will encounter poems they've never read before. The book is not a chronologically organized literary history, nor an encyclopedia, nor a collection of thematically related essays; rather it is an attempt to provide a systematic overview of these poetic works, and to restore it to a position of centrality in modern criticism.

Boedecker and Sider's edited volume gathers the best of the recent research on Simonides' newly expanded oeuvre into a single collection which will be an important reference for scholars of Greek poetry.

This first general bibliography on contemporary Spanish American poets focuses on writers born between 1910 and 1952. Three generations are represented: The first, poets born 1910-1925 and including such notable figures as Octavio Paz, Jose Lezama Lima, Nicanor Parra, Gonzalo Rojas, Olga Orozco, and Alvaro Mutis, may be said to concentrate on language. The second generation, poets born 1925-1939 whose work was consolidated in the 1960s, with many exceptions are concerned with politics and history. Representative figures include Ernesto Cardenal, Roque Dalton, Juan Gelman, and Jose Emilio Pacheco. Poets of the latest generation may perhaps be characterized by awareness of the poetic sign. Though less well known, their inclusion allows the reader to incorporate the poetry of the 1980, and early 1990s into the panorama of Spanish American literature. Providing both primary and secondary sources, this comprehensive reference work will serve scholars and students as the point of departure for research on contemporary Spanish American poetry on any of the eighty-six poets included. For each poet, the listing of original writings comprises (a) poetic works, (b) compilations and anthologies, and (c) other works, such as fiction and essays; the secondary listing consists of bibliographies and critical studies. A bibliography of general works follows and complements the listings for individual poets. It includes a general section and studies organized by countries. The poets also are entered by date of birth in a chronology along with their nationalities. An index of critics completes the work.

Jimi Hendrix, Princess Diana and Syria's Asma Al-Assad rub shoulders with Auden, Eliot and Shelley - and with the Trouser Thief Clive met during ten long weeks locked up in a closed psychiatric ward - in this offbeat and affectionate poetic biography. Since 2010, when Clive was told he had three separate life-threatening conditions, he has poured out a stream of fine poems - sometimes light, witty and paradoxical, sometimes sad, heartfelt and regretful. Some, like `Japanese Maple', an instant Internet sensation, have already made it into the anthologies. Others, like his book-length epic, The River in the Sky, are more demanding. All are packed with the unexpected ideas, inventive imagery and breathtaking wordplay that have helped him achieve his avowed ambition of becoming `a fairly major minor poet'.