"At the heart of this 'Literary Life' are fresh interpretations of Keats's most loved poems, alongside other neglected but rich poems. The readings are placed in the contexts of his letters to family and friends, his medical training, radical politics of the time, his love for Fanny Brawne, his coterie of literary figures and his tragic early death" --

OurCommonDwelling explores why America's first literary circle turned to nature in the 1830s and '40s. When the New England Transcendentalists spiritualized nature, they were reacting to intense class conflict in the region's industrializing cities. Their goal was to find a secular foundation for their social authority as an intellectual elite. New England Transcendentalism engages with works by William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. The works of these great authors, interpreted in historical context, show that both environmental exploitation and conscious love of nature co-evolved as part of the historical development of American capitalism.

Chuvash-born poet Gennady Aygi (1934-2006) is considered the father of late-Soviet avant-garde Russian poetry. This first full-length critical study of his work and poetics in any language brings a new voice into the critical conversation of twentieth-century poetry of witness. It charts the development of Aygi's poetics from his Mayakovsky-inspired verses as a student under the tutelage of Boris Pasternak, to those of a full-fledged poet's poet, drawing equally on the Russian poetic and religious tradition, European literature and philosophy, and Chuvash literature, folk culture, and cosmology. Writing from 1955 until his death in 2006, Aygi bridges the Soviet and post-Soviet, lyrical and avant-garde, personal and political. The transcultural roots and global reach of his work bring together Chuvash, Russian, European, and Volga Tatar languages and traditions to form a truly unique transnational poetics and a model for a new category of Russophone literature.

These volumes present the works of eleven poets writing in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Volume 1 contains work by Mary E. Tucker Lambert and the notorious Adah Isaacs Menken. The other three volumes contain works by nine other poets. Surprisingly, only one of them (Lizelia Moorer) protests at the treatment of her race during this period of social upheaval and injustice. The other poets treat the traditional themes - love, nature, death, Christian idealism and morality, family - in conventional forms and language. As interesting for the themes that they address as for those that they ignore, these selections offer a unique sampling of poetic voices that until now have gone largely unheard.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Why was Milton so important to the Romantics? How did 'Milton the Regicide', a man often regarded in his lifetime as a dangerous traitor and heretic, become 'the Sublime Milton'? The late eighteenth century saw a sudden and to date almost undocumented craze for all things Miltonic, the symptoms of which included the violation of his grave and the sale of his hair and bones as relics, the republication of all his works including his political tracts in unprecedented numbers, the appearance of the poet in the works, letters, dreams and visions of all the major British Romantic poets and even frequent reports of hauntings by his ghost. Drawing on the traditions of cultural, intellectual and bibliographic history as well as recent trends in literary scholarship on the romantic period, Joseph Crawford explores the dramatic shift in Milton's cultural status after 1790. He builds on a now significant literature on Milton's legacy to the Romantic poets, uncovering the cultural historical background against which the Romantics and their contemporaries encountered and interacted with Milton's reputation and works.

God and the Gothic: Romance and Reality in the English Literary Tradition provides a complete reimagining of the Gothic literary canon to examine its engagement with theological ideas, tracing its origins to the apocalyptic critique of the Reformation female martyrs, and to the Dissolution of the monasteries, now seen as usurping authorities. A double gesture of repudiation and regret is evident in the consequent search for political, aesthetic, and religious mediation, which characterizes the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and Whig Providential discourse. Part one interprets eighteenth-century Gothic novels in terms of this Whig debate about the true heir, culminating in Ann Radcliffe's melancholic theology which uses distance and loss to enable a new mediation. Part two traces the origins of the doppelganger in Calvinist anthropology and establishes that its employment by a range of Scottish writers offers a productive mode of subjectivity, necessary in a culture equally concerned with historical continuity. In part three, Irish Gothic is shown to be seeking ways to mediate between Catholic and Protestant identities through models of sacrifice and ecumenism, while in part four nineteenth-century Gothic is read as increasingly theological, responding to materialism by a project of re-enchantment. Ghost story writers assert the metaphysical priority of the supernatural to establish the material world. Arthur Machen and other Order of the Golden Dawn members explore the double and other Gothic tropes as modes of mystical ascent, while raising the physical to the spiritual through magical control, and the M. R. James circle restore the sacramental and psychical efficacy of objects.

"Chaucerian Aesthetics" examines "The Canterbury Tale" and "Troilus and Criseyde" from both medieval and post-Kantian vantage points. These sometimes congruent, sometimes divergent perspectives illuminate both the immediate pleasure of encountering beauty and its haunting promise of intelligibility. Although aesthetic reflection has sometimes seemed out of sync with modern approaches to mind and language, Knapp defends its value in general and demonstrates its importance for the analysis of Chaucer's narrative art. Focusing on language games, persons, women, humor, and community, this book ponders what makes art beautiful.

Criticism has largely emphasized the private meaning of "Romantic Satanism", treating it as the celebration of subjectivity through allusions to Paradise Lost that voice Satan's solitary defiance. The first full-length treatment of its subject, Romantic Satanism explores this literary phenomenon as a socially produced myth exhibiting the response of writers to their milieu. Through contextualized readings of the major works of Blake, Shelley, and Byron, this book demonstrates that Satanism enabled Romantic writers to interpret their tempestuous age: it provided them a mythic medium for articulating the hopes and fears their age aroused, for prophesying and inducing change.

The Other Virgil tells the story of how a classic like the Aeneid can say different things to different people. As a school text it was generally taught to support the values and ideals of a succession of postclassical societies, but between 1500 and 1800 a number of unusually sensitive readers responded to cues in the text that call into question what the poem appears to be supporting. This book focuses on the literary works written by these readers, to show how they used the Aeneid as a model for poems that probed and challenged the dominant values of their society, just as Virgil had done centuries before. Some of these poems are not as well known today as they should be, but others, like Milton's Paradise Lost and Shakespeare's The Tempest, are; in the latter case, the poems can be understood in new ways once their relationship to the 'other Virgil' is made clear.

This is a reprint of the authoritative six-volume edition of the Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Superbly edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, each volume contains illustrations, appendices, and an index.

Hardy was a poet of ghosts. In his poetry he describes himself as posthumous; as rekindling the cinders of passion; as the guardian of the dead forgotten by history; and as haunted by ghosts, particularly the specter of the lost child (as in the rumor that he fathered a child in the 1860s). Using Derrida, Abraham, and Torok and other theorists, and referring to Victorian debates on materialism, this book investigates ghostliness, historicity, and memory in Hardy's poetry.

Joy Davidman is known, if she is known at all, as the wife of C. S. Lewis. Their marriage was immortalized in the film Shadowlands and Lewis's memoir, A Grief Observed. Now, through extraordinary new documents as well as years of research and interviews, Abigail Santamaria brings Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis to the page in the fullness and depth she deserves. A poet and radical, Davidman was a frequent contributor to the communist vehicle New Masses and an active member of New York literary circles in the 1930s and 40s. After growing up Jewish in the Bronx, she was an atheist, then a practitioner of Dianetics; she converted to Christianity after experiencing a moment of transcendent grace. A mother, a novelist, a vibrant and difficult and intelligent woman, she set off for England in 1952, determined to captivate the man whose work had changed her life. Davidman became the intellectual and spiritual partner Lewis never expected but cherished. She helped him refine his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, and to write his novel Till We Have Faces. Their relationship-begun when Joy wrote to Lewis as a religious guide-grew from a dialogue about faith, writing, and poetry into a deep friendship and a timeless love story.

This is the first book to consistently read English Modernist literature as testimony to trauma of the First and Second World Wars. Focusing upon T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence, it examines the impact of war upon their lives and their strategies to resist it through literary innovation.

Rereading Chaucer and Spenser is a much-needed volume that brings together established and early career scholars to provide new critical approaches to the relationship between Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. By reading one of the greatest poets of the Middle Ages alongside one of the greatest poets of the English Renaissance, this collection poses questions about poetic authority, influence, and the nature of intertextual relations in a more wide-ranging manner than ever before. With its dual focus on authors from periods often conceived as radically separate, the collection also responds to current interests in periodisation. This approach will engage academics, researchers and students of Medieval and Early Modern culture. -- .

Many eighteenth-century people wrote verse epistles, but no study has addressed their full variety and significance. This is the first book to cover the whole range of epistolary verse in the period, including not only the discursive type favoured by Pope and others, but also familiar and dramatic epistles. It advances a new model for defining the form, demonstrates the form's importance in the period, and pays special attention to non-canonical epistles, including those by women, occasional and labouring-class writers.

Reliquaries, elaborate containers housing the remains of the holy dead, informed numerous aspects of medieval culture. Incorporated into religious ceremonies, they contributed to the voiced, world-creating work of performance. At the same time, their decoration often included inscription, silent and self-referential. In the reliquary, silent inscription and spoken performance enshrined one another to produce a visual language about representation. Using texts by Chaucer, along with anonymous plays, lyrics, and hagiographic verse, "The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary" shows how the reliquary's visual language explicated the representational processes of late-medieval English poetry.

These volumes present the works of eleven poets writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Volume 1 contains work by Mary E. Tucker Lambert and the notorious Adah Isaacs Menken. The other three volumes contain works by nine other poets. Surprisingly, only one of them (Lizelia Moorer) protests at the treatment of her race during this period of social upheaval and injustice. The other poets treat the traditional themes - love, nature, death, Christian idealism and morality, family - in conventional forms and language. As interesting for the themes that they address as for those that they ignore, these selections offer a unique sampling of poetic voices that until now have gone largely unheard.

From 'open field' to the internet, and via concrete and experimental poetry, this book draws out connections between the turn towards ideas of space in cultural and social theory and developments in contemporary poetry. Readings of a range of poets from the UK and the USA explore the relationship between their work, the processes and politics of globalization and issues of nationality, identity, language and geography.

The poetry produced by the British poets of the 17th and 18th centuries is considered to be among the best ever written. But many general readers feel intimidated by the language or structure of the poetry, and so tend to shy away from enjoying these poets and their works. Nelson takes readers on a tour of the major works and figures of 17th- and 18th-century British poetry, explaining major themes, devices, styles, language, rhythm, sound, tone, imagery, form, and meaning. Beginning each chapter with a sketch of the poet's life and career, the author then looks at five or six representative works, helping readers understand and appreciate the beauty of poetry itself. From Donne and Jonson, to Pope, Swift, and Burns, the book offers excerpts of the poetry these artists crafted, and carefully examines the various attributes that have helped to establish them as some of the greatest of all time. Writing in clear, accessible language, Nelson also introduces general poetry terms to the novice, providing examples and explanations where necessary. Readers will no longer feel intimidated by "difficult poetry." Instead, they will walk away with the tools they need to read, understand, and appreciate these titans of British letters.

This book provides a lively exploration of the way in which several of the major British Romantic poets confront the writing and theorising of poetry. The question 'What is a poet?' is asked and answered with great frequency and variety; invariably there is an underlying sense of unease, often in the shadow, as it were, of Wordsworth's lines: We poets in our youth begin in gladness;/ But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness . The apparent confidence of the manifestoes is undermined by the self-doubts of much of the poetry, ranging from Coleridge to John Clare.

"An important part of the Irish national imaginary, Yeat's poems and plays have helped to invent the nation of Ireland, while critiquing the modern Irish state that emerged from the nation's revolutionary period. This study offers a chronological account of Yeat's volumes of poetry, contextualizing and analyzing them in light of Irish cultural and political history."--

Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter is an innovative study of Scott's and Byron's poetical engagement with borders (actual and metaphorical) and the people living on and around them. The author discusses Scott's edited collection of Border Ballads, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and his narrative poetry, and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage , cantos 1 and 2, his Eastern Tales, and his late, utopian South-Sea poem The Island. This fascinating study provides a detailed exegesis of the importance of borders to these leading poets and the public, during the early years of the Nineteenth-Century, with an emphasis on reciprocal literary influences, and on attitudes towards cultural instability.

R. S. Thomas's presentation of God has given rise to controversy and dissent. In exploring Thomas's techniques of creating his image of God, Elaine Shepherd addresses the problems surrounding the language of religion and of religious poetry. After a consideration of the possibilities of both the positive and negative ways of imaging God and the problematics of religious poetry as a genre, a sequence of close readings engages the reader in an exploration of language and image. Each chapter focuses on a significant image, examining its construction and its potential to stand as an image for God, from the image of woman as constructed by the Impressionists to the non-image of the mystical theologian.

This is a reprint of the authoritative six-volume edition of the Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Superbly edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, each volume contains illustrations, appendices, and an index.