This detailed literary and rhetorical analysis of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo treats the poem as a unified work of art in which sophisticated poetic craftsmanship is put to the service of serious ethical thought. By means of parallels from Homer, Hesiod, and other Homeric hymns, as well as from later epideictic poetry and prose, the author seeks to show that the poet of the Hymn follows a coherent ''program'' whose intention is to praise Apollo from his birth on humble Delos to his establishment in a position of glory at Delphi. At the same time, the ''Delian'' and ''Pythian'' portions of the hymn are linked by a complex network of ideas bearing on the ethos of Apollo and the nature of his Delphic oracle. The study takes into account previous scholarship on the Hymn and provides appendices on ''The Question of Unity'' and ''The Cosmological Hierarchy and Apollo's Timai''.

"Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000" brings together key critical and theoretical texts from the twentieth century which have animated debates about modern poetry. This book helps readers to think critically about the nature of modern poetry, and to engage with broader questions about aesthetics, language, culture and imagination. It includes texts by poets, critics, theorists and philosophers, ranging from Ezra Pound to Jacques Derrida. Texts in translation from French, German, Spanish, Italian and Russian are presented alongside the work of writers from Britain, Ireland, the United States, Africa, India and the Caribbean. Each text is accompanied by a brief biographical and thematic introduction. There is a system of cross-referencing which points up significant connections and disagreements between the texts. This book includes a thematic index and chronology.

Chaucer was a keen observer of the lives of women with a remarkable ability to see beyond his culture's preconceptions concerning their proper roles. The lives of medieval women were divided into three estates--virginity, wifehood, and widowhood--each with complex rules extending to particulars of speech and dress, but all directed toward the single purpose of preserving female chastity, for which a woman was to be prepared to suffer or even die. Margaret Hallissy's lively and literate study traces Chaucer's female characterizations against a background of medieval rules and common assumptions governing women to determine where he adhered to or departed from the behavioral norms. She concludes that he discounted much of these codes of conduct as being detrimental to the development of a full human person. The Wife of Bath, Chaucer's most drastic deviation from the received wisdom about women of his day, could only have been developed by an author/narrator who turned from the prescribed written rules--which, sacred or secular, were all instruments of patriarchal power--to female discourse and action. Applying insights from the works of modern social historians of the Middle Ages and ranging widely in sources from the visual arts, civil and canon law, homiletics, theology, architecture, fashion history, and medicine, Hallissy illuminates the preconceptions with which Chaucer's original audience would have encountered his work and brings her findings to bear on a close analysis of literary characters in the text. The resulting study provides an original and essential dimension for reading Chaucer, while its feminist-historicist approach broadens the audience to those interested in medieval studies and women's studies in general.

In 1953 African-American poet Langston Hughes began corresponding with several South African writers variously affiliated with the legendary "Drum" magazine. Published here for the first time, these letters provide an invaluable glimpse into the growing repression of South African apartheid and the slow but painful progress of the American Civil Rights movement. Revealing a fascinating set of transatlantic friendships between a titan of American letters and a group of writers that includes Peter Clarke, Todd Matshikiza, Bloke Modisane, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Peter Abrahams, and Richard Rive, this volume highlights Hughes’s enormous influence on the rise of English-language literature by black and mixed-race writers in South Africa.

Through the narratives and movements of survivors of the war in Lanka these interconnected essays develop the concept of 'survival media' as embodied and expressive forms of mobility across borders.

Whether looming over public squares or dotting old battlefields, monuments certify a culture's present by securing its past and pledging its future. They embody exemplary persons or events and the shared ideals they stood for, prompting an obligation to keep those ideals standing now and forever. But monuments also exaggerate the staying power of civilizations and of art. In the second half of the twentieth century, postmodern critics often decried monuments not only for their pretensions and stiffness but also for their supposed role in perpetuating oppressive cultural conventions. Even so, many artists and thinkers of the same period tried to reimagine monuments in ways that were humbler and more provisional but still culturally confirming.

In "Castings," Guy Rotella examines the work of five important poets who have engaged in that effort: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney. Considering their wider careers as well as particular poems--including Bishop's "The Monument," Lowell's "For the Union Dead," Merrill's "Bronze," Walcott's "The Sea Is History," and Heaney's "In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge"--Rotella argues that these writers are less concerned with defending or condemning monuments than with pursuing ancient and current debates about the political, aesthetic, and broadly cultural issues that monuments condense. Among these concerns are the competing claims of life and art, persistence and change, meaning and meaninglessness, the self and society, and the governing and the governed.

Original and provocative, Rotella's readings will make us ponder how the human impulse to build to last, to reify our culturally derived and ideologically driven faiths, might coexist with those other creeds of our place and time: relativism, multiculuralism, and diversity.

From the translator of the bestselling Poetic Edda (Hackett, 2015) comes a gripping new rendering of two of the greatest sagas of Old Norse literature. Together the two sagas recount the story of seven generations of a single legendary heroic family and comprise our best source of traditional lore about its members-including, among others, the dragon-slayer Sigurd, Brynhild the Valkyrie, and the Viking chieftain Ragnar Lothbrok.

Homer, as we have come to know, was an oral poet. He composed two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and performed them without the aid of writing. Each of these tales is the length of a substantial book. How, we wonder, could a poet such as Homer have woven such tales? This book is a study of Homer from a cognitive perspective. The author draws on work in cognitive psychology and linguistics to show how a storyteller who performs before a listening audience works with the resources of memory to produce his tale.

Robert Durling's spirited new prose translation of the Paradiso completes his masterful rendering of the Divine Comedy. Durling's earlier translations of the Inferno and the Purgatorio garnered high praise, and with this superb version of the Paradiso readers can now traverse the entirety of Dante's epic poem of spiritual ascent with the guidance of one of the greatest living Italian-to-English translators.
Reunited with his beloved Beatrice in the Purgatorio, in the Paradiso the poet-narrator journeys with her through the heavenly spheres and comes to know "the state of blessed souls after death." As with the previous volumes, the original Italian and its English translation appear on facing pages. Readers will be drawn to Durling's precise and vivid prose, which captures Dante's extraordinary range of expression--from the high style of divine revelation to colloquial speech, lyrical interludes, and scornful diatribes against corrupt clergy.
This edition boasts several unique features. Durling's introduction explores the chief interpretive issues surrounding the Paradiso, including the nature of its allegories, the status in the poem of Dante's human body, and his relation to the mystical tradition. The notes at the end of each canto provide detailed commentary on historical, theological, and literary allusions, and unravel the obscurity and difficulties of Dante's ambitious style . An unusual feature is the inclusion of the text, translation, and commentary on one of Dante's chief models, the famous cosmological poem by Boethius that ends the third book of his Consolation of Philosophy. A substantial section of Additional Notes discusses myths, symbols, and themes that figure in all three cantiche of Dante's masterpiece. Finally, the volume includes a set of indexes that is unique in American editions, including Proper Names Discussed in the Notes (with thorough subheadings concerning related themes), Passages Cited in the Notes, and Words Discussed in the Notes, as well as an Index of Proper Names in the text and translation. Like the previous volumes, this final volume includes a rich series of illustrations by Robert Turner.

This is the first study to consider the relationship between private confessional rituals and memory across a range of early modern writers, including Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Robert Southwell.

In A Dialogue between Haizi's Poetry and the Gospel of Luke Xiaoli Yang offers a conversation between the Chinese soul-searching found in Haizi's (1964-1989) poetry and the gospel of Jesus Christ through Luke's testimony. It creates a unique contextual poetic lens that appreciates a generation of the Chinese homecoming journey through Haizi's poetry, and explores its relationship with Jesus Christ. As the dialogical journey, it names four stages of homecoming-roots, vision, journey and arrival. By taking an interdisciplinary approach-literary study, inter-cultural dialogue and comparative theology, Xiaoli Yang convincingly demonstrates that the common language between the poet Haizi and the Lukan Jesus provides a crucial and rich source of data for an ongoing table conversation between culture and faith.

Dudley Randall was one of the foremost voices in African American literature during the twentieth century, best known for his poetry and his work as the editor and publisher of Broadside Press in Detroit. While he published six books of poetry during his life, much of his work is currently out of print or fragmented among numerous anthologies. Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall brings together his most popular poems with his lesser-known short stories, first published in The Negro Digest during the 1960s, and several of his essays, which profoundly influenced the direction and attitude of the Black Arts movement. Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall is arranged in seven sections: "Images from Black Bottom," "Wars: At Home and Abroad," "The Civil Rights Era," "Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects," "Love Poems," "Dialectics of the Black Aesthetic," and "The Last Leap of the Muse." Poems and prose are mixed throughout the volume and are arranged roughly chronologically. Taken as a whole, Randall's writings showcase his skill as a wordsmith and his affinity for themes of love, human contradictions, and political action. His essays further contextualize his work by revealing his views on race and writing, aesthetic form, and literary and political history. Editor Melba Joyce Boyd introduces this collection with an overview of Randall's life and career. The collected writings in Roses and Revolutions not only confirm the talent and the creative intellect of Randall as an author and editor but also demonstrate why his voice remains relevant and impressive in the twenty-first century. Randall was named the first Poet Laureate of the City of Detroit and received numerous awards for his literary work, including the Life Achievement Award from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1986. Students and teachers of African American literature as well as readers of poetry will appreciate this landmark volume.

The boundaries separating Literary Studies from other kinds of humanistic inquiry are more permeable now than at any moment since the Enlightenment, when disciplinary categories began to acquire their modern definition. "The Forms of Renaissance Thought" celebrates scholarship at a number of these frontiers. The contributors address works of the European Renaissance as they relate both to the textured world of their origins and to a modern scholarly culture that turns to the early moderns for methodological provocation and renewal. In this way, the volume charts the most important developments in the field since the turn towards cultural and ideological features of the Renaissance imagination.

Analyzing the poets Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes, and Amiri Baraka, this study charts the Afro-Modernist epic. Within the context of Classical epic traditions, early 20th-century American modernist long poems, and the griot traditions of West Africa, Schultz reveals diasporic consciousness in the representation of African American identities.

Lizette Woodworth Reese was a professional, independent woman from the time she left high school in 1873. She began her teaching career that year and published her first poem in Baltimore's Southern Magazine in 1874. She taught for 45 years in the public schools of Baltimore. Her poetry and her readings of it were particularly popular in women's roups throughout the United States. She was one of the founders of the Woman's Literary Club of Baltimore and its chairman of poetry until her death in 1935. In April, 1931 she was named Poet Laureate of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. In that same month, she was iven an honorary doctorate of literature by Goucher College which called her one of the greatest living women in America. In her lifetime, Reese was internationally admired for her poetic genius and hailed by H.L. Mencken as one of the most distinguished poets in the United States. This volume is the first extensive collection of her poems since her Selected Poems was published in 1926. The volume begins with a short biographical sketch of the poet and includes some 250 of her poems. The poems are arranged into sections illustrating some of her major themes: nature, love, remembrance, faith, family, history, and literature. An eighth section contains a complete narrative poem, Little Henrietta, about the life and death of a young girl. Introductory comments help to place Reese in the continuum of American poetry and to indicate her influence on succeeding generations of poets. The book also includes an extensive bibliography and a subject index.

This book traces the creative process in Yeats's writing, in his making and remaking of verse, and in the development of a whole body of work during the last forty years of his life. Lyrical and philosophical poetry, verse-drama, the shifting contexts of personal and political events -including controversy, world and civil war, and a large dose of artistic experimentation - are all dealt with here. The book is illustrated and loaded with unpublished material, including the extant remains of Yeats's ambitious but unfinished 'fifth play for dancers', based on the local legends of Ballylee that Yeats made his own. The book addresses overlooked or inadequately presented findings in Yeats studies and brings to light much wholly new matter, including a comprehensive 'Chronology' of the composition of poems, the first since Ellmann's The Identity of Yeats. The book welcomes newcomers interested in detailed narratives about poetry 'well-made' and life well-lived.

From Jewish publishers to Appalachian poets, Green s cultural study reveals the role of "Mountain Whites" in American racial history. Part One (1880-1935) explores the networks that created American pluralism, revealing Appalachia s essential role in shaping America s understanding of African Americans, Anglos, Jews, Southerners, and Immigrants. Drawing upon archival research and deft close readings of poems, Part Two (1934-1946) delves into the inner-workings of literary history and shows how diverse alliances used four books of poetry about Appalachia to change America s notion of race, region, and pluralism. Green starts with how Jesse Stuart and the Agrarians defended Southern whiteness, follows how James Still appealed to liberals, shows how Muriel Rukeyser put Appalachia at the center of anti-fascism, and ends with how Don West and the Progressives struggled to form interracial labor unions in the South.

Chris Stamatakis reappraises Sir Thomas Wyatt (c.1504-1542) as a poetic innovator from the literary avant-garde of early Tudor England. He discusses Wyatt's reflections on the writing process, and his awareness of how words can be turned in new directions - that is, rewritten, amended, transformed, manipulated, even performed - over the course of a text's production, transmission, and reception. Where previous studies have read Wyatt's poetry from a largely biographical standpoint, this book examines the reading practices of his Tudor audiences and editors, and it considers the different types of textuality shown by the manuscript collections that contain his verse. By setting Wyatt's writings in the context of sixteenth-century theories of language and literary practice, and by drawing on early Tudor educational, rhetorical, and courtierly handbooks, Stamatakis examines the rhetoric of rewriting that colours Wyatt's texts. Repeatedly, his writings invite readers to 'turn' or perform the word-to draw out something that lies inert within it. These habits of rewriting and verbal performance often serve to sustain an intimate dialogue between writers and readers in this literary culture. The book pays particular attention to the fascinating materiality of Wyatt's texts: the margins around, and the interlinear spaces within, his poems are regularly filled with new text-handwritten scrawls that are supplied by Wyatt himself or by his copyists, editors and readers. Chapters are devoted to the types of rewriting found in each of Wyatt's main genres: Plutarchian essays; forensic apologias; psalm paraphrases; letters and verse epistles, and lyrics or 'balets'. Two appendices offer further detail about patterns of manuscript transmission and the copying of Wyatt's poems. Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting argues that reading often shaded into writing (and rewriting) in the early sixteenth century, and it shows how acts of apparent copying often transformed texts inventively and imaginatively.

The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio is one of the most discussed sources for the Norman Conquest of England. Its authorship and date cannot be established entirely beyond dispute, but the weight of scholarly opinion supports a date of composition of 1068 or earlier, by Guy, bishop of Amiens, thus making it the earliest surviving account. Whatever its date, the Carmen remains a source of intrinsic interest and importance, and one used by some of the great chroniclers of the period, such as Orderic Vitalis. It is an epic poem, concerned with some of the most momentous events of a remarkable year, in which Halley's comet was a disturbing portent of undisclosed disasters. For this second edition, Frank Barlow has written an entirely new and substantial historical introduction, incorporating the scholarly research of a generation. He has also provided a fresh translation and notes, as well as revising the Latin text of the 1972 edition by Catherine Morton and Hope Muntz.

A major work of Latin literature, Tristia 2 is a verse letter addressed by the exiled poet Ovid to the man who banished him from Rome, the emperor Augustus. Ovid apologizes to Augustus for the misdemeanours that led to his banishment, but, more importantly, defends both his life and his poetry in light of the accusation that his earlier Ars amatoria (The Art of Love) had promoted adultery. Jennifer Ingleheart's commentary, the most up-to-date and comprehensive one available, is an invaluable guide to all aspects of the poem - textual, literary, historical, and political - while her Introduction explores, among other topics, its ironical and subversive aspects.