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.

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.

Faced with the chaos and banality of modern, everyday life, a number of Victorian poets sought innovative ways of writing about the unpoetic present in their verse. Their varied efforts are recognisably akin, not least in their development of mixed verse-forms that fused novel and epic to create something equal to the miscellaneousness of the age.

By comparing and contrasting the pre-conversion and the post-conversion poetics and poetic practices of T.S. Eliot, this book elucidates the responsibilities and opportunities for a poet who is also Christian. This book is the second in a trilogy which includes T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word.

Homer's poetry is widely recognized as the beginning of the literary tradition of the West and among its most influential canonical texts. Outlining a series of key themes, ideas, and values associated with Homer and Homeric poetry, Homer: A Guide for the Perplexed explores the question of the formation of the Iliad and the Odyssey - the so-called 'Homeric Problem'. Among the main Homeric themes which the book considers are origin and form, orality and composition, heroic values, social structure, and social bias, gender roles and gendered interpretation, ethnicity, representations of religion, mortality, and the divine, memory, poetry, and poetics, and canonicity and tradition, and the history of Homeric receptions. Drawing upon his extensive knowledge of scholarship on Homer and early epic, Ahuvia Kahane explores contemporary critical and philosophical questions relating to Homer and the Homeric tradition, and examines his wider cultural impact, contexts and significance. This is the ideal companion to study of this most influential poet, providing readers with some basic suggestions for further pursuing their interests in Homer.

This major work of historical and interpretative scholarship draws upon fresh evidence to set the Songs in a new perspective. Blake's etchings are substantially discussed alongside the poems they illustrate. The plates of both Innocence and Experience are considered in detail as Blake's response to social circumstances between 1782 and 1794. The reader is asked to re-think the nature of 'the Two Contrary States', and the relationship of the designs to the understanding of Blake.

Taking a fresh look at the poetry and visual art of the Hellenistic age, from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. to the Romans' defeat of Cleopatra in 30 B.C., Graham Zanker makes enlightening discoveries about the assumptions and conventions of Hellenistic poets and artists and their audiences.
Zanker's exciting new interpretations closely compare poetry and art for the light each sheds on the other. He finds, for example, an exuberant expansion of subject matter in the Hellenistic periods in both literature and art, as styles and iconographic traditions reserved for grander concepts in earlier eras were applied to themes, motifs, and subjects that were emphatically less grand.

Treating the work of Sappho, Goethe, Blake, Holderlin, Verlaine, George, Morike, and Yeats in detail, Benjamin Bennett makes the provocative argument that the nature of lyric poetry in the West has an element of defectiveness. The book sets out to prove that using the idea of perfection, which is applied routinely as a criterion of excellence in lyric poems, is fundamentally misguided. Once poetry in the Western tradition is established as fundamentally imperfect, Bennett reveals it to be as deeply exposed to problems in the social and political environment as any other form of literature.

This book offers a fresh contextual reading of Paradise Lost that suggests that a recovery of the vital intellectual ferment of the new science, magic, and alchemy of the seventeenth century reveals new and unexpected aspects of Milton's cosmos and chaos, and the characters of the angels and Adam and Eve. After examining the contextual references to cabalism, hermeticism, and science in the invocations and in the presentation of chaos and Night, the book focuses on the central stage of the epic action, Milton's unique cosmos, at once finite and infinite, with its re-orientation of compass points. While Milton relies on the new astronomy, optics and mechanics in configuring his cosmos, he draws upon alchemy to suggest that the imagined prelapsarian cosmos is the crucible within which vital re-orientations of authority could have taken place.

Taking into account the latest criticism, this book argues that Hardy seems contemporary with D.H. Lawrence in his insights into the unconscious and sexuality, and has been the model for the contemporary reaction against modernist poetry. The book goes on to say that Hardy reversed his usual emphasis on sexuality in The Mayor of Casterbridge and his last novel, The Well-Beloved.

Claudian was one of the last great Latin poets of the classical tradition, writing at the imperial court in Milan in the late fourth to early fifth century AD. With the current upsurge of research into late antiquity, he is a figure of great interest who has been undeservedly neglected - a creative artist with an immense knowledge of classical literature and a distinctive literary style. His works have been mined for what they reveal about the history of the period, as he largely wrote political propaganda for members of the court circle; but the De Raptu Proserpinae is fascinating in that it shows him working with subject matter of more personal choice. J. B. Hall has already produced two editions of the work, which deal exhaustively with the complicated manuscript traditions; but he self-confessedly leaves aside literary questions, which are the subject of this commentary. This is therefore the first study to look at the poem as a work of literary interest in its own right. The book includes a text designed to simplify Hall's apparatus, and a facing translation to make the work more accessible to non-specialists.

Chaucerian Ecopoetics performs ecocritical close readings of Geoffrey Chaucer's poetry. Shawn Normandin explains how Chaucer's language demystifies the aesthetic charm of his narratives and calls into question the anthropocentrism they often depict. This text combines ecocriticism with reading techniques associated with deconstruction, to provide innovative interpretations of the General Prologue, the Knight's Tale, the Miller's Tale, the Reeve's Tale, the Franklin's Tale, the Physician's Tale, and the Monk's Tale. In stressing the importance of rhetorical nuance and literary form, Chaucerian Ecopoetics enables readers to better understand the ideological prehistory of today's environmental crisis.

How can we use art to reconstruct ourselves and the material world? Is every individual an art object? Is the material world an art text? This text answers these questions by examining modernist literature, especially James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, in the context of anarchist intellectual thought and Georges Sorel's theory of social myth.

Michael Longley has been called 'one of the finest lyric poets of our time'. In assembling the work of forty years, his Collected Poems displays a brilliantly sustained achievement whose depth, beauty and wit can now be fully appreciated. Longley's poetry combines intense concentration with remarkable variety. The formal and thematic range laid down in No Continuing City (1969) has undergone a series of rich metamorphoses up to Snow Water (2004), and the two poems included here as an epilogue. Longley's genres span love poetry, war poetry, nature poetry, elegies, satires, verse epistles, poems that reflect on art and the art of poetry. He has extended the capacity of the lyric to absorb dark matter: the Great War, the Holocaust, the Northern Irish 'Troubles'. His poetic landscape intermingles Belfast (where he lives), western Ireland, Italy, Japan and Homeric Greece. Longley's superb translations from classical poets (such as 'Ceasefire', which greets the IRA ceasefire in terms of the Iliad) speak to contemporary issues while activating the deepest sources of European poetry.

Modern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence investigates the ways in which some of our best poets writing in English have used poetic sequences to capture the lived experience of marriage. Beginning in 1862 with George Meredith's Modern Love, Jane Hedley's study utilizes the rubrics of temporality, dialogue, and triangulation to bring a deeply rooted and vitally interesting poetic genre into focus. Its twentieth- and twenty-first-century practitioners have included Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Lowell, Rita Dove, Eavan Boland, Louise Gluck, Anne Carson, Ted Hughes, Claudia Emerson, Rachel Zucker, and Sharon Olds. In their poetic sequences the flourishing or failure of a particular marriage is always at stake, but as that relationship plays out over time, each sequence also speaks to larger questions: why we marry, what a marriage is, what our collective stake is in other people's marriages. In the book's final chapter gay marriage presents a fresh testing ground for these questions, in light of the US Supreme Court's affirmation of same-sex marriage.

Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics offers a range of Pre-Raphaelite literary scholarship, provoking innovative discussions into the poetic form, gender dynamics, political engagement, and networked communities of Pre-Raphaelitism. The authors in this collection position Pre-Raphaelite poetics broadly in the sense of poiesis, or acts of making, aiming to identify and explore the Pre-Raphaelites' diverse forms of making: social, aesthetic, gendered, and sacred. Each chapter examines how Pre-Raphaelitism takes up and explores modes of making and re-making identity, relationality, moral transformations, and even, time and space. Essays explore themes of formalist or prosodic approaches, expanded networks of literary and artistic influence within Pre-Raphaelitism, and critical legacies and responses to Pre-Raphaelite poetry and arts, codifying the methods, forms, and commonalties that constitute literary Pre-Raphaelitism.

John Milton's many and various works include magnificent poems, polemics, history, theology, and treatises on political, ecclesiastical, educational, and social issues. No writer before Milton defined himself so self-consciously as an author - both in prose and in poetry - as his God-given vocation.

In her detailed account of Milton's life and career, Barbara Lewalski provides a close analysis of his prose and poetry, focusing on the development of his ideas and his art. She shows how Milton, even as a young poet, constructed himself as a new kind of author, commanding astonishing resources of learning and artistry to develop a radical politics, reformist poetics, and an inherently revolutionary prophetic voice.

This insightful portrayal of Milton's life, thought, and writing, as well as his contribution to public life, is an important, stimulating, and timely contribution to Milton scholarship.

The culmination of a trilogy that began with T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word, and continued with T.S. Eliot: The Poet as Christian, this gracefully executed new book brings to a triumphant conclusion the unique effort to pinpoint and identify the Christian characteristics of Eliot's poetic art. The book offers a close but companionable reading of each of the complex poems that make up Four Quartets, the essay-poem that is Eliot's masterwork. Focusing on the range of speaking voices dramatized, Atkins reveals for the first time the Incarnational form that governs the work's 'purposive movement' toward purification and fulfilment of points of view that were represented earlier in the poems.

Northern Irish Poetry and Theology argues that theology shapes subjectivity, language and poetic form, and provides original studies of three internationally acclaimed poets: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon.