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.

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.

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.

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.

'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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

'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.

This vivid biography is a study of the life and times of the Italian poet-activist, Lauro de Bosis. Remarkably productive as a poet, cultural diplomat, and political subversive, de Bosis founded and lead an underground resistance group, the National Alliance for Liberty. His actions culminated in a dramatic solo flight over Rome in October 1931, showering the city with protest leaflets against the Fascist dictatorship before plunging to his death. This feat brought world attention to the existence of anti-Fascism, much to Mussolini's chagrin and rage.

De Bosis's story, told against the backdrop of Rome's politics in the 1920s, is at once personal, national, and international. World figures --- from Mussolini, Croce, Ezra Pound, to Walter Lippmann, Thornton Wilder, and his lover, the actress Ruth Draper --- were all within de Bosis's compass. Gifted, quirky, original, and impulsive but principled to the point of giving up both personal love and family for his cause, his life shows how Mussolini's regime systematically cleared out the cream of Italy's young liberal intellectuals. Based on previously untapped archival resources, this is the first biography of a young, gifted Italian poet who dared to challenge the power of a totalitarian state with his practical idealism and fierce determination to protect Italy's fragile democracy from il Duce.

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.

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.

In the wake of the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, the subject of In Memoriam, Alfred Tennyson wrote a range of intricately connected poems, many of which feature pivotal scenes of rapture, or being carried away. This book explores Tennyson's representation of rapture as a radical mechanism of transformation-theological, social, political, or personal-and as a figure for critical processes in his own poetics. The poet's fascination with transformation is figured formally in the genre he is credited with inventing, the dramatic monologue. Tennyson's Rapture investigates the poet's previously unrecognized intimacy with the theological movements in early Victorian Britain that are the acknowledged roots of contemporary Pentacostalism, with its belief in the oncoming Rapture, and its formative relation to his poetic innovation. Tennyson's work recurs persistently as well to classical instances of rapture, of mortals being borne away by immortals. Pearsall develops original readings of Tennyson's major classical poems through concentrated attention to his profound intellectual investments in advances in philological scholarship and archeological exploration, including pressing Victorian debates over whether Homer's raptured Troy was a verifiable site, or the province of the poet's imagination. Tennyson's attraction to processes of personal and social change is bound to his significant but generally overlooked Whig ideological commitments, which are illuminated by Hallam's political and philosophical writings, and a half-century of interaction with William Gladstone. Pearsall shows the comprehensive engagement of seemingly apolitical monologues with the rise of democracy over the course of Tennyson's long career. Offering a new approach to reading all Victorian dramatic monologues, this book argues against a critical tradition that sees speakers as unintentionally self-revealing and ignorant of the implications of their speech. Tennyson's Rapture probes the complex aims of these discursive performances, and shows how the ambitions of speakers for vital transformations in themselves and their circumstances are not only articulated in, but attained through, the medium of their monologues.

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 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.

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.

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.