Considered by many to be the greatest Irish song poet of her generation, Maire Bhui Ni Laeire (Yellow Mary O'Leary; 1774-1848) was an illiterate woman unconnected to elite literary and philosophical circles who powerfully engaged the politics of her own society through song. As an oral arts practitioner, Maire Bhui composed songs whose ecstatic, radical vision stirred her community to revolt and helped to shape nineteenth-century Irish anti-colonial thought. This provocative and richly theorized study explores the re-creative, liminal aspect of song, treating it as a performative social process that cuts to the very root of identity and thought formation, thus re-imagining the history of ideas in society.

Book 4 of Lucan's epic contrasts Europe with Africa. At the battle of Lerida (Spain), a violent storm causes the local rivers to flood the plain between the two hills where the opposing armies are camped. Asso's commentary traces Lucan's reminiscences of early Greek tales of creation, when Chaos held the elements in indistinct confusion. This primordial broth sets the tone for the whole book. After the battle, the scene switches to the Adriatic shore of Illyricum (Albania), and finally to Africa, where the proto-mythical water of the beginning of the book cedes to the dryness of the desert. The narrative unfolds against the background of the War of the Elements. The Spanish deluge is replaced by the desiccated desolation of Africa. The commentary contrasts the representations of Rome with Africa and explores the significance of Africa as a space contaminated by evil, but which remains an integral part of Rome. Along with Lucan's other geographic and natural-scientific discussions, Africa's position as a part of the Roman world is painstakingly supported by astronomic and geographic erudition in Lucan's blending of scientific and mythological discourse. The poet is a visionary who supports his truth claims by means of scientific discourse.

Pindar-the 'Theban eagle', as Thomas Gray famously called him-has often been taken as the archetype of the sublime poet: soaring into the heavens on wings of language and inspired by visions of eternity. In this much-anticipated new study, Robert Fowler asks in what ways the concept of the sublime can still guide a reading of the greatest of the Greek lyric poets. Working with ancient and modern treatments of the topic, especially the poetry and writings of Friedrich Hoelderlin (1770-1843), arguably Pindar's greatest modern reader, he develops the case for an aesthetic appreciation of Pindar's odes as literature. Building on recent trends in criticism, he shifts the focus away from the first performance and the orality of Greek culture to reception and the experience of Pindar's odes as text. This change of emphasis yields a fresh discussion of many facets of Pindar's astonishing art, including the relation of the poems to their occasions, performativity, the poet's persona, his imagery, and his myths. Consideration of Pindar's views on divinity, transcendence, time, and the limits of language reveals him to be not only a great writer but a great thinker.

Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian are the three most influential poets from Northern Ireland who have composed poems with a link to pre- and post-revolutionary Russia. Their attraction to the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union reflects the increasing fascination with Eastern European literature among western writers. Russian authors finding their way into the poetry are, among others, Alexander Pushkin, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak and Joseph Brodsky. By incorporating intertextual links into their work, Heaney, Paulin and McGuckian establish parallels between Russia and Northern Ireland in terms of history, politics, literature and culture. They attempt to reconsider the Northern Irish conflict through a Russian framework in order to subvert the established discourse of the Troubles based on British Unionism and Irish Nationalism. Their references to Russia allow the three poets to achieve a geographical and mental detachment in order to turn a fresh eye on the Northern Irish situation.

American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounteroffers a framework for understanding the variety of imagined encounters by eight different American poets with their imagined 'Chinese' subject. The method is historical and materialist, insofar as the contributors to the volume read the claims of specific poems alongside the actual and tumultuous changes China faced between 1911 and 1979. Even where specific poems are found to be erroneous, the contributors to the volume suggest that each of the poets attempted to engage their 'Chinese' subject with a degree of commitment that presaged imaginatively China's subsequent dominance. The poems stand as unique artifacts, via proxy and in the English language, for the rise of China in the American imagination. The audience of the volume is international, including the growing number of scholars and graduate students in Chinese universities working on American literature and comparative cultural studies, as well as already established commentators and students in the west.

"At once erudite and colloquial" (New Yorker), this book provides an accessible introduction to the joys and challenges of poetry In Don't Read Poetry, poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another-and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish-and distinguish among-individual poems. A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingenues and cognoscenti alike.

In this gracefully executed book, G. Douglas Atkins continues his explorations of the poetry and prose of T.S. Eliot. In highly original terms, Atkins offers a major new analysis of Eliot's debt to and use of Lancelot Andrewes, the seventeenth-century Anglican churchman, who was one of the greatest sermon-writers in the language, author of the enormously popular Preces Privatae (Private Prayers), and director of one of six 'companies' responsible for the King James translation of the Bible. Focusing on their shared attention to verbal and linguistic detail, Atkins for studies closely Eliot's 1928 collection For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order; demonstrates the poetic use Eliot makes of Andrewes's writing in Journey of the Magi, and presents a fresh and important, full-scale reading of Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, a work heavily indebted to Andrewes's emphasis on the central Christian dogma of the Incarnation.

Best remembered today as the author of The Song of Hiawatha, Longfellow continues to be one of the most popular poets in American literary history. This book is a guide to his life and writings. A brief introductory essay overviews Longfellow's life and accomplishments. A chronology then summarizes the chief events in his career. Hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries follow, discussing individual poems, his other writings, his family members and professional associates, and topics related to his life and literary achievements. Entries list works for further reading, and the volume closes with a selected, general bibliography. Longfellow has also enjoyed fame worldwide; in England, his poems outsold those of Browning and Tennyson. In addition to being a gifted poet, Longfellow had a brilliant career as a college professor. He wrote numerous critical works and translations, and was also a leading American Dante scholar. He frequently wrote letters, and his admirers often sought his advice on personal and professional matters.

This book stages a series of interventions and inventions of urban space between 1880 and 1930 in key literary texts of the period. Making sharp distinctions between modernity and modernism, the volume reassesses the city as a series of singular sites irreducible to stable identities, concluding with an extended reading of The Waste Land .

"A Manner of Utterance" offers a collection of responses to J.H. Prynne's poetry by his readers: not merely academics, but poets, composers, teachers and a painter (Ian Friend, one of whose works is featured on the cover). The contributors include Ian Brinton (also editor of the volume), David Caddy, Ian Friend, Richard Humphreys, Li Zhi-min, Rod Mengham, Keston Sutherland, John Douglas Templeton and Erik Ulman.

Constructing Coleridge examines Coleridge's penchant for re-invention and carefully demonstrates how the Coleridge family editors followed his lead in constructing his posthumous reputation. Following his death in 1834, the family editors faced immediate scandals and sought to construct the Coleridge they preferred in these trying circumstances.

This book attempts to explain the nature of the influence of Platonism on English poetry, exclusive of drama, of the 16th and 17th centuries. The subject is not treated from the standpoint of the individual poet but, rather, the whole body of English poetry of the period is interpreted as an integral output of the spiritual thought and life of the time.

"Byron's Romantic Celebrity" offers a new history and theory of modern celebrity. It argues that celebrity is a cultural apparatus that emerged in response to the Romantic industrialization of print and culture and that Lord Byron should be understood as one of its earliest examples and most astute critics. Under that rubric, it investigates the often strained interactions of artistic endeavour and commercial enterprise, the material conditions of Byron's publications, and the place of celebrity culture in history of the self.

Famously, Blake believed that "without contraries" there could be no "progression." Conflict was integral to his artistic vision, and his style, but it had more to do with critical engagement than any urge to victory. The essays in this volume look at conflict as it marked Blake's thinking on politics, religion and the visual arts.

An Introduction to the Ilaid and the Odyssey

The story of the Beatles begins not with the rock-'n'-roll revolution of the 1950s, but in the Romantic revolution of the 1790s, when age-old notions about literature, politics, education, and social relations changed forever. Tracing the Beatles to their late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poetic, musical, and philosophic roots, "The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles "weaves literary criticism and cultural analysis together to how the Fab Four--in their songs, personalities, and relations with each other--mirror the themes and history of Anglo-American Romanticism.

This is a fascinating literary-critical study of the ways the Virgin Mary has been presented in English poetry, from the later Middle Ages to today. Ranging across a vast variety of approaches to this timeless topic, Spurr shows how poets have spoken of their own beliefs and preoccupations (and of their cultures and their historical periods) in giving poetic expression to the most famous woman in history. Spurr's ground-breaking account is a 'must read' for anyone interested in the history of poetry, of religious verse and of representations of the eternal feminine in literature.

This book provides a reassessment of the writings of Hartley Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth and presents them in a new poetics of relationship, re-evaluating their relationships with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to restore a more accurate understanding of Hartley and Dorothy as independent and original writers.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who confessed the unrelenting anguish of addiction and depression, Anne Sexton (1928-1974) was also a dedicated teacher. In this book, Paula M. Salvio opens up Sexton's classroom, uncovering a teacher who willfully demonstrated that the personal could also be plural. Salvio looks at how Sexton framed and used the personal in teaching and learning, and considers the extent to which our histories--both personal and social--exert their influence on teaching. In doing so, she situates the teaching life of Anne Sexton at the center of what feminist philosophers consider to be key problems and questions in feminist pedagogy: navigating the appropriate distance between teacher and student, the relationship between writer and poetic subject, and the relationship between emotional life and knowledge. Examining Sexton's pedagogy, with its "weird abundance" of tactics and strategies, Salvio argues that Sexton's use of the autobiographical "I" is as much a literary identity as a literal identity, one that can speak with great force to educators who recognize its vital role in the humanities classroom.

This study considers George Eliot's novels in relation to Dante and to nineteenth-century Italian culture during the Italian national revival and shows how these helped shape her fiction. Thompson argues that Eliot was able to draw selectively on a powerful Risorgimento mythology of national regeneration and that her engagement with the work of Dante Alighieri increases steadily in her later novels, where the Divine Comedy becomes a sustaining metaphor for Eliot's meliorist vision and for her theme of moral growth through suffering.