"Old and Middle English Poetry" gathers together the essential texts from the earliest writings in the vernacular up to the time of Chaucer.
Contains a selection of the most significant Old and Middle English Poetry.
Encapsulates the foundation and consolidation of literature written in English.
Places traditional favourites are alongside less well-known titles, reflecting the ways in which the literary canon has changed in recent years.
Includes a succinct introduction, which gives readers a sense of how literature developed during the period.
Ideal for readers seeking a first introduction to the classic texts of English literature.

Reading Eighteenth-Century Poetry recaptures for modern readers the urgency, distinctiveness and rewarding nature of this challenging and powerful body of poetry.
An essential guide to reading eighteenth-century poetry, written by world-renowned critic, Patricia Meyer Spacks
Exposes the multiplicity of forms, tones, and topics engaged by poets during this period
Provides in-depth analysis of poems by established figures such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, as well as work by less familiar figures, including Anne Finch and Mary Leapor
A broadly chronological structure incorporates close reading alongside insightful contextual and historical detail
Captures the power and uniqueness of eighteenth-century poetry, creating an ideal guide for those returning to this period, or delving into it for the first time

Comic poetry is serious stuff, combining incongruity, satire and psychological effects to provide us a brief victory over reason that could help us save ourselves, if not the world. Taking a theoretical perspective, this book champions the literary movement of American comic poetry, providing historical context and exploring the work of such writers as Denise Duhamel, Campbell McGrath, Billy Collins, Thomas Lux and Tony Hoagland. The techniques of these poets are examined to reveal how they make us laugh while addressing important social concerns.

First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Swinburne called him a bad poet, Tennyson called him dull, Saintsbury called him thin. John Schad celebrates Clough the anti-poet, a loving laureate of the extraordinary dull, who is so thin we can see through, or beyond him. Clough, argues Schad, never gets in the way of the world, or worlds, of which he writes. And these worlds are many: ranging from the orthodox world of the Anglican Oxford that Clough famously abandons, through the turbulent worlds of Paris and Rome that Clough visits in the wake of the revolutionary events of 1848, to the quietly desperate world of Clough's final years. For Schad, though, Clough's defining world is the very strange world of continental thought, a world which makes him a most un-Victorian Victorian.

In the field of Nusantaran literary studies, systematic interpretations of individual literary works are still a relatively rare phenomenon. This book shows how such interpretations can be fruitfully produced for traditional Malay literature.

After a distinguished career as a teacher, scholar, bibliographer and literary critic, Stanley Brian Greenfield, Professor of English at the University of Oregon, one of the founders of the annual Anglo-Saxon England and of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, died in 1987. He wrote primarily on Anglo-Saxon topics as well as later English poetry. He deeply explored the Old English poetic corpus, pointing out important meanings and qualities in insightful and sensitive readings. Hero and Exile brings together some of his most important essays, divided into three sections - Beowulfian Studies, The Old English Elegies and The Theme of Exile - attesting to his long and fruitful engagement with Old English literature.

The contributors analyze Whitman's life and work as a reflection of his concerns for such societal issues as war and peace, women's rights, and the threat of slavery to American democracy, as well as a reflection of more personal issues of sexual preference and familial ties. Each of these and many other topics receive careful consideration and attention by scholars who have devoted much of their professional lives to aspects of Whitman's life and work.

Poet, critic, biographer and Catholic intellectual, Paul Mariani delivers huge armfuls of experience and knowledge in this wide-ranging collection of twenty-four essays. As a man of faith in a secular world, Mariani brings to light issues surrounding spirituality and poetry through discussions of the Gnostics, Roman history, the Bible, John of the Cross, Rilke, Robert Pack, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, and the poets he most admires - Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell. Charged with spiritual and intellectual awe, Mariani fully engages with his subjects, from their lives to their works to their grand impact on Mariani's own life as a poet. His prose flows easily from anecdote to analysis, from Paterson, the setting of Williams's great tribute poem, to Manhattan, where Mariani haunts old neighborhoods and the Brooklyn Bridge, searching for traces of Hart Crane. By infusing scholarly criticism with a personal voice, Mariani allows us to see the relationship between poetry and a sublime presence in the universe. Serious reading for anyone interested in modern and contemporary poetry, God and the Imagination offers elegant and original insights into a wide variety of poetic concerns. But it is most extraordinary for its celebration of the lives of the poets, which allow us, in Mariani's words, ""to recover what would otherwise be lost to time and silence.

The life and work of C.S. Lewis after his conversion in 1931 is well known and his reputation shows no signs of diminishing. His earlier years have not been so well studied, particularly between the ages of 16 and 22 when he studied privately and at Oxford, served in the British army, was wounded in France, entered into his affair with Janie Moore, and wrote and published his first book of poems. To correct and augment the limited accounts of this period, Lewis s life is presented with the general and specific background which makes it more meaningful, particularly as it throws light on his character. The romantic myth of him as a "soldier-poet" is dispelled, largely through an extensive review of the poems in "Spirits in Bondage" and the self-centered life that produced them. A valuable comparison not to the advantage of Lewis is drawn with two undoubted soldier-poets, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. The purpose is not to disparage or belittle Lewis but to show what had to be overcome in his limited and unpleasant early moral character in order to produce the devoted Christian of later years."

Offering essays from some of the leading academic writers and younger scholars in the field of American studies from both the United States and Europe, this volume constitutes a rich and varied reconsideration of Modernist American poetry. Its contributions fall into two general categories: new and original discussions of many of the principal figures of the movement (Frost, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Cummings and Stevens) and reflections on the phenomenon of Modernism within a broader cultural context (the influence of Haiku, parallels and connections with Surrealism, responses to the Modernist accomplishment by later American poets). Because of its mixture of European and American perspectives, "Modernism Revisited" will be of vital interest to students and scholars of American literature and Modernism in general and of twentieth-century comparative literature and art.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading 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 intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading 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 intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

Poetry and music have seldom been more closely associated than at the end of the nineteenth century, and the texts in which Baudelaire and Wagner, Mallarme and Scriabin, Maeterlinck and Debussy evoked the reader's and the listener's states of mind are unusually rich in suggestion. Can poetry combine, as music seems to do, the transcendent satisfaction of an all-inclusive viewpoint with the excitement and uncertainty of an unfolding narrative? Can it partake of music's power in order to give a face to the idea, and substitute, without disappointing, a definite variation for the ineffable theme? Symbolist writers intent on achieving musical effects in words looked for ways to overcome the hard division of subjects at the foundation of language, and the strategies they invented, while not always successful, show their supreme expectations concerning the receptive capability of their audience and an unqualified belief in the transforming power of their art. Students of aesthetics, of French and comparative literature should find something of interest in this provocative and original book. For ease of reference, a detailed abstract of the contents is provided, along with English translations of all quotations in other languages.

The Virgilian centos anticipate the avant-garde and smash the image of a staid, sober, and centered classical world. This book examines the twelve mythological and secular Virgilian centos that survive from antiquity. The centos, in which authors take non-consecutive lines or segments of lines from the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid and reconnect them to produce new poems, have received limited attention. No other book-length study exists of all the centos, which date from ca. 200 to ca. 530.
The centos are literary games, and they have a playful shock value that feels very modern. Yet the texts also demand to be taken seriously for what they disclose about late antique literary culture, Virgil's reception, and several important topics in Latin literature and literary studies generally. As radically intertextual works, the centos are particularly valuable sites for pursuing inquiry into allusion. Scrutinizing the peculiarities of the texts' allusive engagements with Virgil requires clarification of the roles of the author and the reader in allusion, the criteria for determining what constitutes an allusion, and the different functions allusion can have. By investigating the centos from these different perspectives and asking what they reveal about a wide range of weighty subjects, this book comes into dialogue with major topics and studies in Latin literature.

This is a pioneering scholarly collection of essays outlining W.B. Yeats' reception and influence in Europe. The intellectual and cultural impact of British and Irish writers cannot be assessed without reference to their reception in European countries. These essays, prepared by an international team of scholars, critics and translators, record the ways in which W. B. Yeats has been translated, evaluated and emulated in different national and linguistic areas of continental Europe. There is a remarkable split between the often politicized reception in Eastern European countries and Spain on the one hand, and the more sober scholarly response in Western Europe. Yeats's Irishness and the pre-eminence of his lyrical work have posed continuous challenges. Three further essays describe the widely divergent reactions to Yeats in his native Ireland, during his lifetime and up to the most recent years. Our knowledge of British and Irish authors is incomplete and inadequate without an understanding of the perspectives of other nations, traditions and individuals on them. This series profiles literary and political figures as well as philosophers, historians and scientists. Each volume examines how authors have been translated, published, distributed, read, reviewed and discussed in Europe. In doing so it throws light not only on the specific strands of intellectual and cultural history but also on the processes involved in the dissemination of ideas.

Defending Poetry studies the tradition of poetic defence, or apologia, as it has been pursued and developed by three of the twentieth century's leading poet-critics: Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. It begins with an extended introduction to philosophical debates over the ethical value of literature from Plato to Levinas and continues by situating these three poets as in one sense historically continuous with the defences of Horace, Sidney, Coleridge, and Shelley, but also as drastically other. This otherness is bounded on one side by the example of T. S. Eliot's career-long contemplation of the ideal of poetic 'integrity', and on the other by a collective recognition of the twentieth century's great horrors, which seem to corrode all associations of art and the good. Through close readings of the poems and prose essays of Brodsky, Heaney, and Hill, Defending Poetry makes a timely intervention in current debates about literature's ethics, arguing that any ethics of literature ought to take into account not only poetry, but also the writings of poets on the value of poetry.

Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning challenges the critical tendency to see Plath's writing in `confessional' terms, and draws attention to its self-reflexivity. The book argues that Plath developed a theatrical conception of the speaking subject. In her closely sustained study, Britzolakis relates the texts both to their historical moment and to contemporary debates about language, gender, and subjectivity.

Matthew Arnold, the foremost Victorian 'man of letters', forged a unique literary career, first as an important post-Romantic poet and then as a prose writer who profoundly influenced the formation of modern literary and cultural studies. Machann challenges the popular image of Arnold as an elitist intellectual and shows how his poetry and prose grew out of his personal life and his passionate engagement with the world, emphasizing the journal publications that drove his career as a literary, social, and religious critic.

This is a monograph offering new analysis of the philosophical connection between Hopkins and Heidegger which has been repeatedly mentioned but not fleshed out in the literature of either literary criticism or philosophy. "Hopkins & Heidegger" is a new exploration of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetics through the work of Martin Heidegger. More radically, Brian Willems argues that the work of Hopkins does no less than propose solutions to a number of hitherto unresolved questions regarding Heidegger's later writings, vitalizing the concepts of both writers beyond their local contexts. Willems examines a number of cross-sections between the poetry and thought of Hopkins and the philosophy of Heidegger. While neither writer ever directly addressed the other's work - Hopkins died the year Heidegger was born, 1899, and Heidegger never turns his thoughts on poetry to the Victorians - a number of similarities between the two have been noted but never fleshed out. Willems' readings of these cross-sections are centred on Hopkins' concepts of 'inscape' and 'instress' and around Heidegger's reading of both appropriation (Ereignis) and the fourfold (das Geviert). This study will be of interest to scholars and postgraduates in both Victorian literature and Continental philosophy.

'I am inclined to think that we want new forms . . . as well as thoughts', confessed Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning in 1845. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry provides a closely-read appreciation of the vibrancy and variety of Victorian poetic forms, and attends to poems as both shaped and shaping forces. The volume is divided into four main sections. The first section on 'Form' looks at a few central innovations and engagements--'Rhythm', 'Beat', 'Address', 'Rhyme', 'Diction', 'Syntax', and 'Story'. The second section, 'Literary Landscapes', examines the traditions and writers (from classical times to the present day) that influence and take their bearings from Victorian poets. The third section provides 'Readings' of twenty-three poets by concentrating on particular poems or collections of poems, offering focused, nuanced engagements with the pleasures and challenges offered by particular styles of thinking and writing. The final section, 'The Place of Poetry', conceives and explores 'place' in a range of ways in order to situate Victorian poetry within broader contexts and discussions: the places in which poems were encountered; the poetic representation and embodiment of various sites and spaces; the location of the 'Victorian' alongside other territories and nationalities; and debates about the place - and displacement - of poetry in Victorian society. This Handbook is designed to be not only an essential resource for those interested in Victorian poetry and poetics, but also a landmark publication--a provocative, seminal volume that will offer a lasting contribution to future studies in the area.