Romantic Organicism attempts to reassess the much maligned and misunderstood notion of organic unity. Following organicism from its crucial radicalization in German Idealism, it shows how both Coleridge and Wordsworth developed some of their most profound ideas and poetry on its basis. Armstrong shows how the tenets and ideals of organicism--despite much criticism--remain an insistent, if ambivalent, backdrop for much of our current thought, including the work of Derrida amongst others.

This new study explores the poetic tradition of the love sonnet sequence in English as written by women from 1621-1931. It connects this tradition to ways of speaking desire in public in operation today, and to the development of theories of subjectivity in Western culture.

This literary life of the best-loved of all the major Romantic writers uses Coleridge's own "Biographia Literaria" as its starting point and destination. The most sustained criticism and ambitious theory that had ever been attempted in English, the "Biographia" was Coleridge's major statement to an embattled literary culture in which he sought to define and defend, not just his own, but all imaginative life. This book offers a reading of Coleridge and his life in the context of that culture and the institutions that comprised it, and is a 'must-read' for any student or scholar of Coleridge.

In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1957) Georg Lukacs discussed how the power struggle of the Cold War made it all the more pressing for literary writers to present 'concrete potentialities' of individual character in novel ways. Powers of Possibility explores how American experimental writers since the 1960s have set about presenting exactly that while engaging with specific issues of social power. The book's five chapters cover a range of writers, literary genres, and political issues, including: Allen Ginsberg's anti-Vietnam War poems; LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Black Power theatre; William S. Burroughs's novels and the Space Programmes; Kathy Acker's fiction and Biopolitics; and Lyn Hejinian, Language poetry, and the Cold War. Each chapter examines how relations of character and social power were widely discussed in terms of potentiality: Black Power groups, for example, debated the 'revolutionary potential' of African Americans, while advances in the space programmes led to speculation about the evolution of 'human potential' in space colonies. In considering how the literary writers engage with such debates, Alex Houen also shows how each writer's approach entails combining different meanings of 'potential': 'possible as opposed to actual'; 'a quantity of force'; a 'capacity' or 'faculty'; and 'potency'. Such an approach can be characterised as a literary 'potentialism' that turns literary possibilities (including experiments with style and form) into an affective aesthetic force with which to combat or reorient the effects of social power on people. Potentialism is not a literary movement, Houen emphasises, so much as a novel concept of literary practice-a concept that stands as a refreshing alternative to notions of 'postmodernism' and the 'postmodern avant-garde'.

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived a richly imaginative life that he expressed in his poems. The Whole Harmonium presents Stevens within the living context of his times and as the creator of a poetry that continues to shape how we understand and define ourselves. A lawyer who rose to become an insurance-company vice president, Stevens composed brilliant poems on long walks to work and at other stolen moments. His first book of poems, Harmonium, published when he was forty-four, drew on his profound understanding of Modernism to create a distinctive and inimitable American idiom. Over time he became acquainted with peers such as Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, but his personal style remained unique. The complexity of Stevens's poetry rests on emotional, philosophical, and linguistic tensions that thread their way intricately through his poems. And while he can be challenging to understand, Stevens has proven time and again to be one of the most richly rewarding poets to read.

Body Narratives deals with changing body configurations in the literature and culture of sixteenth-century England. It investigates the relationship between disciplinary discourses of the human body and political body imagery in the texts of courtly writers like Spenser, Sidney, Ralegh, and others, and traces its interdependence in their narratives of national identity, imperial expansion, and gender difference.

Paradise Lost has excited and provoked poets and critics for over 300 years. This introduction provides an accessible route into Milton's influential epic poem, guiding students through each of the twelve books by a combination of close textual analysis and summary of key themes and techniques. Without assuming prior knowledge, Nutt helps navigate the book's biblical and classical background and its relationship to seventeenth-century history. Focusing on developing the reading skills needed to approach this important and complex poem independently, A Guide to Paradise Lost is essential reading for all students of Milton.

After a period of neglect, Ovid's elegiac poem on the Roman calendar has been the focus of much recent scholarship. In her comprehensive and scholarly study of the final book, Joy Littlewood analyzes Ovid's account of the origins of the festivals of June, demonstrating that Book 6 is effectively a commemoration of Roman War, and elegantly provides a framing bracket to balance the opening celebration of Peace in Book 1. She explores the subtle interweaving of pietas and virtus in Roman religion and its relationship to Augustan ideology, the depth and accuracy of Ovid's antiquarianism, and his audacious expansion of generic boundaries.

This broad and original study of the full range of John Clare's work is the first to take seriously his repeated appeals to the judgement of future readers. Restoring the suppressed history of Clare's deep cultural engagement, it teases out, in clear terms, the often unexpected complexities of his varied writings. A series of close readings reveals Clare's sophisticated poetics: his covert quotations, his careful analysis of the history and culture of his own place, and his fascination with literary success and posthumous fame.

This volume assembles sixteen authoritative articles on Homer's Odyssey that have appeared over the last thirty years. A wide variety of interpretative strategies are represented, including, in addition to traditional close readings, the approaches of comparative anthropology, narratology, feminism, and audience-oriented criticism. Papers have been selected for their clarity and accessibility, and each is informed by close attention to philological and textual detail. A full glossary and list of abbreviations have been included, and a specially written introduction puts the selections in a wider context by giving an overview of major strands in the interpretation of Homer in the second half of the twentieth century.

In Beyond Reformation? An Essay on William Langland's Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity, David Aers presents a sustained and profound close reading of the final version of William Langland's Piers Plowman, the most searching Christian poem of the Middle Ages in English. His reading, most unusually, seeks to explore the relations of Langland's poem to both medieval and early modern reformations together with the ending of Constantinian Christianity. Aers concentrates on Langland's extraordinarily rich ecclesiastic politics and on his account of Christian virtues and the struggles of Conscience to discern how to go on in his often baffling culture. The poem's complex allegory engages with most institutions and forms of life. In doing so, it explores moral languages and their relations to current practices and social tendencies. Langland's vision conveys a strange sense that in his historical moment some moral concepts were being transformed and some traditions the author cherished were becoming unintelligible. Beyond Reformation? seeks to show how Langland grasped subtle shifts that were difficult to discern in the fourteenth century but were to become forces with a powerful future in shaping Western Christianity. The essay form that Aers has chosen for his book contributes to the effectiveness of the argument he develops in tandem with the structure of Langland's poem: he sustains and tests his argument in a series of steps or "passus," a Langlandian mode of proceeding. His essay unfolds an argument about medieval and early modern forms of Constantinian Christianity and reformation, and the way in which Langland's own vision of a secularizing, de-Christianizing late medieval church draws him toward the idea of a church of "fools," beyond papacy, priesthood, hierarchy, and institutions. For Aers, Langland opens up serious diachronic issues concerning Christianity and culture. His essay includes a brief summary of the poem and modern translations alongside the original medieval English. It will challenge specialists on Langland's poem and supply valuable resources of thought for anyone who continues to struggle with the church of today.

From this renowned research-level series, Poems and Contexts: Yeats Annual 16 thrusts Yeats's poems back into the circumstances of their creation and revision, thereby addressing what is very much the coming subject in studies of the Irish Literary Revival and the Modernist Movement: the historicity of Yeats's texts. Essayists and their themes include Wayne Chapman on Yeats's Rebellion Poems, while Joseph M. Hassett and P. S. Sri address Yeats's poetic sequences from fresh viewpoints. Deirdre Toomey illuminates the turning point of 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited', A. Norman Jeffares contributes a major biographical study of Iseult Gonne, and Neil Mann a study of George Yeats and Athanasius Kircher. The volume also features research materials, including a full printing of Richard Ellmann's Notebooks on Yeats.

Written in an age of revolutions, Lyrical Ballads represents a radical new way of thinking - not only about literature but also about our fundamental perceptions of the world. The poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge continues to be among the most appealing and challenging in the rich tradition of English Literature; and Lyrical Ballads, composed at the height of the young authors' creative powers, is now widely acclaimed as a landmark in literary history. In this lively study, detailed analysis of individual poems is closely grounded in the literary, political and historical contexts in which Lyrical Ballads was first conceived, realised and subsequently expanded into two volumes. John Blades examines poetry from both volumes and carefully reassesses the poems in the light of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's revolutionary theories, while Part II of the study broadens the discussion by tracing the critical history of Lyrical Ballads over the two centuries since its first publication. Providing students with the critical and analytical skills with which to approach the poems, and offering guidance on further study, this stimulating book is essential reading.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN POETRY, with its wellsprings in jazz and vernacular culture and its inescapable political dimension, stands among the most important bodies of literary work of the twentieth century. This collection of essays and six lively interviews with practicing poets, arising from the now-famous Furious Flower Conference of 1994, provides a mosaic of the major critical and aesthetic issues emerging from the poetry and its literary milieu.

African-American poets writing in the last fifty years have raised their voices in the struggle against racism, sexism, political and economic exploitation, violence, and injustice. Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Haki Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones), Joyce Ann Joyce, Sherley Anne Williams, Michael S. Harper, Margaret Walker and many others have created lyrical beauty in their exploration of public and private concerns. Unlike any previous scholarship, The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry draws readers into a dialogue with leading poets and critics of African-American literature and culture. The interviews and critical essays address the adequacy and appropriateness of theoretical models for assessing the work of black poets, the construction of a literary framework in which to place the poets and their work, and the art and purpose of the poets themselves.

Furious Flowering offers students, scholars, readers, and writers of African-American poetry a chance to take part in an unprecedented discussion of a complex literary culture.

In this study, the author looks at the role the warrior-hero plays within a set of predetermined political and social constraints. The hero if not a sword-wielding barbarian, bent only upon establishing his own fame; such fame-seekers (including some famous medieval literary figures) might even fall outside the definition of the Germanic hero, the real value of whose deeds are given meaning only within the political construct. Individual prowess is not enough. The hero must conquer the blows of fate because he is committed to the conquest of chaos, and over all to the need for social stability. Even the warrior-hero's concern with his reputation is usually expressed negatively: that the wrong songs are not sung about him. The author discusses works in Old English, Old and Middle High German, Old Norse, Latin and Old French, deliberately going beyond what is normally thought of as "heroic poetry" to include the German so-called "minstrel epic" and a work by a writer who is normally classified as a late medieval chivalric poet, Konrad von Wurzburg, the comparison of which with "Beowulf" allows us to span half a millennium.

The Petrarchan revival in Romantic England was a unique phenomenon which involved an impressive number of scholars, translators and poets. This book analyses the way Petrarch was read and re-written by Romantic figures. The result is a history of the Romantic-era sonnet and a new lens for understanding English Romantic poetry.

Matthew Arnold was one of the nineteenth century's greatest spokesmen for the saving power of culture, especially of poetry, to substitute for a vanishing religion. Yet he was persistently troubled throughout his career by the difficulty of finding adequate authority in language. Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language explores Arnold's attempts to find an authoritative language, and argues that his occasional claims for such a language reveal more uneasiness than confidence in the value of ""letters."" It examines Arnold's poetry within this context and demonstrates that his various experiments - to speak in oracular voice, to use classic forms, to achieve a grand style - and their failures, reflect the inevitable difficulties facing any poet in an age of intellectual and cultural upheaval. Riede argues that Arnold's determined efforts to write with authority, combined with his deep-seated suspicion of his medium, result in an exciting if often agonized tension in his poetic language - a language that strains against its inevitable but generally unacknowledged limitations.

Anna Seward and her career defy easy placement into the traditional periods of British literature. Raised to emulate the great poets John Milton and Alexander Pope, maturing in the Age of Sensibility, and publishing during the early Romantic era, Seward exemplifies the eighteenth-century transition from classical to Romantic. Claudia Thomas Kairoff's excellent critical study offers fresh readings of Anna Seward's most important writings and firmly establishes the poet as a pivotal figure among late-century British writers.

Reading Seward's writing alongside recent scholarship on gendered conceptions of the poetic career, patriotism, provincial culture, sensibility, and the sonnet revival, Kairoff carefully reconsiders Seward's poetry and critical prose. Written as it was in the last decades of the eighteenth century, Seward's work does not comfortably fit into the dominant models of Enlightenment-era verse or the tropes that characterize Romantic poetry. Rather than seeing this as an obstacle for understanding Seward's writing within a particular literary style, Kairoff argues that this allows readers to see in Seward's works the eighteenth-century roots of Romantic-era poetry.

Arguably the most prominent woman poet of her lifetime, Seward's writings disappeared from popular and scholarly view shortly after her death. After nearly two hundred years of critical neglect, Seward is attracting renewed attention, and with this book Kairoff makes a strong and convincing case for including Anna Seward's remarkable literary achievements among the most important of the late eighteenth century.

From his work editing "Wordsworth's Juvenile Poetry (1785-1790)," Duncan Wu came to understand that much of the content of the poet's later great work drew on early childhood experiences, particularly delayed mourning arising from his parents' deaths. This original study is the first fully to investigate the impact of this formative experience on Wordsworth's poetry and to integrate it into a critical account of how his art developed from 1787 to 1813. In doing so it seeks to explain the importance of Wordsworth's great epic, "The Recluse," to his work as a whole, and looks at how some of it got written and why it was left unfinished at his death.

The book includes 20 illustrations from original notebooks retained by the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, and, among its numerous discoveries, presents the first annotated reading text of The "White Doe of Rylstone" (1808) with its important 'Advertizement'. Written in an accessible manner, this revealing study will be of great interest to students and researchers of Wordsworth's poetry.

Philip Larkin is one of the finest English poets of our time. His poetic personality - nostalgic, wry, melancholy, ironic, witty and haunting - has appealed to a far wider audience than that of literary specialists, while also winning the respect of leading critics and fellow poets. Lerner's study relates poetry to Larkin's life, and to the literary and social environment of post-war Britain; discusses the Larkin persona, and Larkin's relation to literary criticism; and above all seeks to guide readers to a full appreciation of the power and subtlety of Larkin's best poems.

A unique collection of twelve critical essays on women's poetry of the eighteenth-century and late enlightenment, the first to range widely over individual poets and to undertake a comprehensive exploration of the formal experiments, aesthetics, and politics of their work. Experiment with genre and form, the poetics of the body, the politics of gender, revolutionary critique, and patronage are themes of the collection.

From the artistic practice of improvisation to the politics of nationalism, the essays in this volume break new ground and significantly extend our understanding of the relations between British and Italian culture in its analysis of the reception of Dante and Italian literature in British Romanticism.

"Taking a fresh approach to Byron, this book argues that he should be understood as a poet whose major works develop a carefully reasoned philosophy. Situating him with reference to the thought of the period, it argues for Byron as an active thinker, whose final philosophical stance - reader-centred scepticism - has extensive practical implications"--