This is an exploration of new aspects of Blake's work using the concept of incarnation and drawing on theories of contemporary digital media. Drawing on recent theories of digital media and on the materiality of words and images, this fascinating study makes three original claims about the work of William Blake. First, Blake offers a critique of digital media. His poetry and method of illuminated printing is directed towards uncovering an analogical language. Second, Blake's work can be read as a performative. Finally, Blake's work is at one and the same time immanent and transcendent, aiming to return all forms of divinity and the sacred to the human imagination, stressing that 'all deities reside in the human breast,' but it also stresses that the human has powers or potentials that transcend experience and judgement: deities reside in the human breast. These three claims are explored through the concept of incarnation: the incarnation of ideas in words and images, the incarnation of words in material books and their copies, the incarnation of human actions and events in bodies, and the incarnation of spirit in matter.

"Temporal Circumstances" provides powerful and detailed interpretations of the most important and challenging of the "Canterbury Tales." Well-informed and clearly written, this book will interest both those familiar with Chaucer's masterpiece and readers new to it.

The advent of relatively cheap editions in the mid-16th century produced an explosion of verse, much of which represented the first person speaker as a version of the author. This book examines ways in which writers, often seeking advancement in their careers, harnessed verse for self-promotional purposes. Texts studied include a manuscript autobiography by Thomas Whythorne, printed verse by a woman, Isabella Whitney, travel and war narratives, as well as canonical texts by Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare.

The pre-modern Arab poet Ibn al-Hajjaj (941-1001) left an indelible mark on the trajectory of pre-modern Arabic poetry and culture by pioneering and popularizing a new mode of poetry, sukhf - obscene and scatological parody. His outrageously obscene poetry was admired by his contemporaries, as well by poets and critics of later periods. The modern period, however, has not been nearly as kind to Ibn al-Hajjaj. Sinan Antoon argues that the reasons for this oversight are ideological, for the most part, and have to do with modern misconceptions of what constitutes "good poetry." The Poetics of the Obscene in Pre-Modern Arabic Poetry is the first study of this fascinating poet and the genre he popularized, placing it within Arab cultural genealogy. Antoon reinscribes Ibn al-Hajjaj into the literary history from which he has been exiled and offers fascinating close readings of the poems in their social and cultural context.

This title proposes a fundamental revaluation of the central poet of British Romanticism. By looking at the later Wordsworth's ekphrastic writings about visual art and his increased awareness of the printed dimension of his work, and by relating these innovations to Wordsworth's sense that he was writing for posterity, Simonsen calls attention to what is uniquely exciting about this neglected body of work, and argues that it complicates traditional understandings of Wordsworth based on his so-called Great Decade.

This book offers an important reconsideration of the cultural impulses that drove American literary modernism. America's modernist poets came of age in a nation struggling to redefine its relationship with poetry and with nature. In the early twentieth century, Darwinian science dictated that as countries became more civilized, as their citizens dwelt increasingly in the realms of artifice they created, they ceased to engage in the invigorating struggles against nature that kept them fit. Civilization led to the medical condition known as degeneration, the morbid deviation of men from an identifiable "normal type." Eager to save America from the fate of a degenerate Europe, Progressive Era reformers prescribed the invigorating contact with American nature as a means to keep the American race clean and healthy. In order for nature to serve as an antidote for degeneration, however, it needed to remain a realm of hard facts and unremitting forces, a delusion-free place free of art that cleansed the mind rather than clouded it. Drawing on a wide range of primary and archival sources, this book argues that the widespread American turn back to nature in the early twentieth century had profound consequences for America's modernist poets. Like other Americans of their day, Harriet Monroe, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore heeded the widespread American call to head back to nature for the sake of the nation's health, but they faced a difficult challenge. Turning to American nature as a means to combat the threat of American degeneration in their literary work, they needed to create a form of American poetry that would be a cure for degeneration rather than a cause. My work reveals the ways in which Monroe's, Pound's, and Moore's struggles to create and publish poems that could resist degeneration by keeping faith with American nature influenced ideas about what American poetry should be and do in the twentieth century.

"This book narrates the first national celebration of united Italy, the Sixth Centenary of Dante Alighieri in May 1865. Denominated alternatively as a national, European, and secular festa, the affair materialized as an eclectic Italian monument with extraordinary political, social and cultural significance. The Centenary was a platform upon which an alternative definition of Italian identity emerged, one based on a Florentine cultural nationalism that opposed the Savoyard territorial nationalism. An stunningly popular event celebrated throughout Italian civil society, the festa was conceived, organized, and strategically promoted from a municipal center, the city of Florence. Its Florentine organizers successfully wrote the story of the Centenary as a parable of the Florentine son, Dante, who fathered the Italian nation as well as king Victor Emmanuel himself"--

This companion volume to James Thomson's The Seasons completes the Oxford English Texts edition of his works and provides for the first time a critical text of all the poems with commentary.

Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets with Observations on their Poetry By Samuel Johnson Originally published circa 1880. A discussion on the lives of fifty two of the most eminent English poets with critical observations on their works. Also added is "the Preface to Shakespeare" and the review of "The Origin of Evil." Includes a sketch of Johnson's life by Sir Walter Scott. Many of the earliest poetry books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Home Farm Books are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

As both a late Romantic and a modern, W.B. Yeats has proved to be an influential poet of the early 20th century. In this study Steven Matthews traces, through close readings of significant poems, the flow of Yeatsian influence across time and cultural space. By engaging with the formalist criticism of Harold Bloom and Paul de Man in their dialogues with Jacques Derrida, he also considers Yeats' significance as founding presence within the major poetry criticism of the 20th century.

In searching for a definitive concept of black theatre, Euba delves deeply into the Yoruba culture and gods, specifically the attributes and ritual of Esu-Elegbara. The resulting vision goes beyond the standard interpretations to place Esu, the fate god, squarely at the center of Yoruba ritual and drama, and by extension, at the center of the black writer's concept of character, actor, and audience as victims of fate and satire. The first section of the book explores the essence of man in the black world of survival. The second, and main section, seeks to develop a concept of drama in black theatre (in African and the New World experience) from the point of view of Esu-Elegbara. The text is highlighted by various illustrations. Three tables outline the Agents of Satire: Imprecator; Imprecator/Satirist; and Satirist/Agent. A bibliography, notes, and an index will help the scholar who wishes to further explore this rich and complex subject. The book is a sophisticated study that will be of great interest to students seeking to understand African influences on black culture today. Potential markets for the book include university-level black history, literature, or culture studies. A broader market might be found among theatre practitioners and students of modern drama.

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.

This study examines several unexplored aspects of Robert Frost’s poetry—proverbs, riddles, and names—and shows how they contribute to the reader's experience. Timothy D. O'Brien argues that while they often shape Frost’s poems as sites of inviting wisdom and play, these features also open up the poems to radical doubt about identity, authorship, and reality. This book offers the most extensive research to date of the relationship between Frost’s poetry and the visual art that often accompanied it and sheds new light on the work of one of the twentieth century’s most highly regarded poets.    

This selection of letters from James Schuyler to legendary poet Frank O'Hara reconstruct a friendship that lay at the heart of the New York school - a convocation of poets including Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery, with whom Schuyler later wrote a novel. It is an encapsulation of a friendship, a mind and a life.

"Blake's Night Thoughts" discusses Blake as a poet and artist of night, considering night through graveyard poetry and Young in the eighteenth century, urbanism in the nineteenth and Levinas and Blanchot's writings in the twentieth. Taking "night" as the breakdown of rational progressive thought and of thought based on concepts of identity, the book reads the lyric poetry, some Prophetic works, including a chapter on "The Four Zoas," the illustrations to Young, and Dante, and looks at Blake's writing of madness.

Relatively little critical attention has been directed towards the explication of James Merrill's difficult poems, much less towards the understanding of his densely-layered symbolism. This is the first comprehensive study to look at Merrill's difficult symbolic system and to provide a close reading of Merrill's epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover. Adams reads Merrill's poetry through various lenses, primarily those of Freudian psychology and of the Jungian archetypal system. His approach allows the reader to view individual works as part of the larger picture of Merrill's quest to save his life through his art.

ILLUSION AND REALITY A STUDY OF THE SOURCES OF POETRY By CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE INTRODUCTION THE BIRTH OF POETRY THE DEATH OF MYTHOLOGY THE INVOLVMENT OF MODERN POETRY ENGLISH POETS: I PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION II THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION III DECLINE OF CAPITALISM THE WORLD THE PHANTASY POETRYS DREAMWORK THE ARTS THE FUTURE OF POETRY..... BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE THIS is one of the great books of our time. It is not easy reading. It is a book to be studied and annotated and returned to again and again. The reader will then find that, however often he takes it up, it will always give him fresh food for thought. The author, Christopher St. John Sprigg, was born in Putney on October 20, 1907. He was educated at the Benedictine school at Ealing. He left school at sixteen and a half and worked for three years as a reporter on the Yorkshire Observer. Then he returned to London and joined a firm of aeronautical publishers, first as editor and later as a director. He invented an infinitely variable gear, the designs for which were published in the Automobile Engineer. They attracted a good deal of attention from experts. He published five textbooks on aero nautics, seven detective novels, and some poems and short stories. All this before he was twentyfive. In May, 1935, under the name of Christopher Caudwell, he published his first serious novel, This My Hand. It shows that lie had made a close study of psychology, but he had not yet succeeded in relating his knowledge to life. At the end of 1934 he had come across some of the Marxist classics, and the following summer he spent in Cornwall immersed in the works of Marx, Engcls, and Lenin, Shortly after hisreturn to London he finished the first draft of Illusion and Reality. Then, in December, he took lodgings in Poplar and later joined the Poplar Branch of the Communist Party. Many of his Poplar comrades were dockers, almost aggressively proletarian, and a little suspicious at first of the, quiet, well spoken young man who wrote books for a living out before long he was accepted as one of themselves, doing his share of whatever had to be done. A few months after joining the Party he went over to Paris to get a firsthand experience of the Popular Front and he came back with renewed energy and enthusiasm. Besides continuing to write novels for a living, he rewrote Illusion and Reality, completed . the essays published subsequently as Studies in a Dying Culture, and began The. Crisis in Physics. He worked to the clock. After spending the day at his typewriter, he would leave the house at five and go out to the Branch to speak at an openair meeting, or sell the Daily Worker at the corner of Crisp Street Market. . Meanwhile, the Spanish Civil War had broken out. The Poplar Branch threw itself into the campaign, with Caudwell as one of the leading spirits. By November they had raised enough money to buy an ambulance, and Caudwell was chosen to drive it across France.

Building on recent work in critical animal studies and posthumanism, this book challenges past assumptions that animals were only explored as illustrative of humanity, not as interesting in their own right. The contributors combine close reading of Chaucer's texts with insights drawn from cultural or critical animal studies.

In this book White "traces the influence of both the comedies and tragedies {of Shakespeare} on Keats's work." (Choice)

This comprehensive guide to the poetry and letters of John Keats offers a highly readable and detailed textual analysis of the themes and techniques of his work. Blades assesses all the major writing - including the narratives and the great odes - and goes on to examine the context of the verse through a survey of the poet's letters and an examination of the key features of nineteenth century Romanticism. This lively and imaginative study concludes with a discussion of some of the most influential critical responses to Keats's work.