This collection gives sustained attention to the literary dimensions of children's poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. While reasserting the importance of well-known voices, such as those of Isaac Watts, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, A. A. Milne, and Carol Ann Duffy, the contributors also reflect on the aesthetic significance of landmark works by less frequently celebrated figures such as Richard Johnson, Ann and Jane Taylor, Cecil Frances Alexander and Michael Rosen. Scholarly treatment of children's poetry has tended to focus on its publication history rather than to explore what comprises - and why we delight in - its idiosyncratic pleasures. And yet arguments about how and why poetic language might appeal to the child are embroiled in the history of children's poetry, whether in Isaac Watts emphasising the didactic efficacy of "like sounds," William Blake and the Taylor sisters revelling in the beauty of semantic ambiguity, or the authors of nonsense verse jettisoning sense to thrill their readers with the sheer music of poetry. Alive to the ways in which recent debates both echo and repudiate those conducted in earlier periods, The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry investigates the stylistic and formal means through which children's poetry, in theory and in practice, negotiates the complicated demands we have made of it through the ages.

The author explores the impact on poetic practice in the 1970s and 1980s of recent theoretical developments, offering a criticism of the latest work of Seamus Heaney and of younger poets including Michael Hofmann and James Fenton, reassessing life on Mars and providing retrospective surveys of Fleur Adcock, Douglas Dunn, Geoffrey Hill, Tom Paulin and Anne Stevenson.

This book reads Milton's "Paradise Lost" as a poem that seeks to educate its readers by narrating the education of its main characters. Many of Milton's characters enter the action in late adolescence, newly independent and eager to test themselves, to discover who they are and their place in the world. The poem charts their progress into moral adulthood. Taking as its premise that attention to the moral development of the poem's main characters will open the poem to most undergraduate readers, this book explores both the pedagogical activity within "Paradise Lost" and the pedagogical activity that the poem encourages.

There is poetry to be found in anything if you look hard enough.

You Took the Last Bus Home is a collection of ingenious, hilarious and touching poems from Brian Bilston, one of Britain’s funniest and best-loved poets.

With endless wit, wisdom and delightful wordplay, Bilston's first collection of poetry offers profound insights into the common joys and sorrows of modern life. Exploring themes as diverse as love, death, and the unbearable torment of forgetting to put the rubbish out, all of Bilston’s poems are alive to the improbable nuances of the English language.

Constantly experimenting with poetic forms – from Venn diagrams to Scrabble tiles – this irresistibly charming collection of poems will make you ponder the very essence of the human condition in the twenty-first century.

Juan Ruiz's "Libro de Buen Amor" (1330/1343) is a lively and challenging medieval classic that ranks alongside the works of Dante and Chaucer. This volume is the first to systematically approach the role of humor in the "Libro de Buen Amor "through the treatment of the body, the visual, and the representation of first-person protagonist as lover. Haywood examines the place of the bawdy and the grotesque in the "Libro de Buen Amor" in relation to secular and sacred culture. This innovative study will be of interest to scholars and students interested in humor, cultural domains, medieval studies, and Spanish studies.

This Norton Critical Edition includes: An expanded translation from the Akkadian by Benjamin R. Foster based on new discoveries, adding lines throughout the world's oldest epic masterpiece. Benjamin R. Foster's full introduction and expanded explanatory annotations. Eleven illustrations. Analogues from the Sumerian and Hittite narrative traditions along with "The Gilgamesh Letter," a parody of the epic enjoyed by Mesopotamian schoolchildren during the first millennium BCE. Essays by Thorkild Jacobsen, William L. Moran, Susan Ackerman, and Andrew R. George, and a poem by Hillary Major. A Glossary of Proper Names and a Selected Bibliography.

Teachers and librarians will find this one-volume reference guide an indispensable tool for identifying anthologies and poem collections that have particular appeal to young adult readers. Comprised of two main components, this resource features an annotated bibliography of 198 poetry volumes, and a thematic guide to over 6,000 individual poems. The carefully chosen anthologies and collections span reading levels from sixth to twelfth grade, and a tremendous breath of interest areas. Poets whose works are cited range from the classic to the contemporary, cover a broad ethnic and geographic spectrum, and range in style from humorous to tragic, rap to blues, free verse to rhymes, and limericks to haiku.

This survey of young adult poetry represents a careful selection and evaluation process undertaken by the authors in consultation with classroom teachers. The annotations help users identify themes in the works, grade level appropriateness, as well as format and content in the poetry collections and anthologies. The authors offer helpful suggestions for ways that these poetry works may be used in the English classroom and beyond; for igniting creative sparks with young writers, for science and social studies discussion, counseling sessions, and for sheer enjoyment. Librarians will value this well-organized resource as both a collection development tool, and--with its index of writers and titles and extensive theme guide--as a way of connecting young readers to wonderful poetry.

These essays are lectures, mostly revised or expanded, given to the Tennyson Society by leading Victorianists, including one of the doyens of Tennyson studies, Jerome H. Buckley. In Memoriam and Maud are central texts, but many other poems are discussed - lyrics, dramatic monologues, narratives, ballads - and such recurrent topics as loss, the numinous and distance in space and time. The poems are related to their intellectual context and to other poets such as Wordsworth and Edward Fitzgerald. The author also wrote Dickens and Crime.

This is the first full-length psychoanalytic study of Shelley's poetry, approaching it from the viewpoint of contemporary Jungian analytical psychology that incorporates the theories of Melanie Klein and D.W.Winnicott. The author uses materials that relate to the earliest stages of the ego's development, going back beyond the Oedipal to pre-Oedipal situation. The book is designed to be of interest to lovers of Shelley as well as feminist readers who want to know how pre-Oedipal images of the mother can profoundly affect literature. Christine Gallant is editor of "Coleridge's Theory of Imagination Today" (AMS Press 1988) and "Blake and the Assimilation of Chaos" (Princeton UP, 1978).

This book is an attempt to explore Shakespearean drama from the vantage point of the oppressed, invisible, and silent individuals and collectivities constructed in the plays. It examines the ideological apparatuses which produce and naturalise oppression and the political structures through which that oppression is sustained. Derek Cohen is concerned to demonstrate the many ways in which political and personal life, always interdependent, intersect. contradict, and disrupt one another often in the interests of and to the advantage of the dominant social ideology.

This Reader's Guide provides a timely critical overview that allows readers to orient themselves authoritatively in the rapidly-evolving field of contemporary British poetry. Focusing on key themes and issues, and a wide range of poets, the Guide captures the intersection between the historical and cultural contexts of critical debate today.

Ted Hughes's South Yorkshire tells the untold story of Hughes's Mexborough period (1938-1951) and demonstrates conclusively that Hughes's experiences in South Yorkshire in town and country, educationally, in literature and love were decisive in forming him as the poet of his subsequent fame.

Occasioned by the spirit of celebrating Keats's 200th birthday (31 October 1995), Jeffrey C. Robinson's Reception and Poetics in Keats offers at once a history and readings of the many praise and commemorative poems to or about Keats (collected in an appendix) from the time of his early death up to the present day and a consequent rethinking of Keats's own poems and poetics. Keats emerges as a poet uniquely available and useful to the experimental poets of our own time.

What have we learned from the first experiments performed at the reconstructed Globe on Bankside? What light have recent productions shed on the way Shakespeare intended his plays to be seen? Written by the Leverhulme Fellow appointed to study and record actor use of this new-old playhouse, here is the first analytical account of the discoveries that have been made in its important first years, in workshops, rehearsals and performances. It shows how actors, directors and playgoers have responded to the demands of 'historical' constraints (and unexpected freedoms) to provide valuable new insights into the dynamics of Elizabethan theatre.

Destabilizing Milton challenges the widely accepted view of Milton as a poet of absolute, unquestioning certainty. In Paradise Lost , Milton confronts the failure of the Revolution by creating a poem that refuses to grant the reader any interpretive stability or certainty. Doubts can no longer be contained and concepts once marked by a 'fundamental immobility' now seem unstable at best. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes equally reflect Milton's deep ambivalences after the collapse of the Republic. Far from confirming his earlier ideals, in his later poetry, Milton subjects his culture's most cherished beliefs, such as the goodness of God, to withering scrutiny, while refusing the comfort of orthodox answers.

Drawing from a broad range of contemporary British poets, including Thomas Kinsella, Kathleen Jamie, and Alice Oswald, this study examines the inherently spatial and affective nature of our engagement with poetry. Adding to the expanding field of geocritical studies, Yeung specifically discusses ideas of space and constructions of voice in poetry.

Despite the painstaking work of Pound scholars, the "mythos" of "The Cantos" has yet to be properly understood -- primarily because until now its occult sources have not been examined sufficiently. Drawing upon archival as well as recently published material, this study traces Pound's intimate engagement with specific occultists (W.B. Yeats, Allen Upward, Alfred Orage, and G.R.S. Mead) and their ideas. The author argues that speculative occultism was a major factor in the evolution of Pound's extraordinary aesthetic and religious sensibility, much noticed in Pound criticism.

The discussion falls into two sections. The first section details Pound's interest in particular occult movements. It describes the tradition of Hellenistic occultism from Eleusis to the present, and establishes that Pound's contact with the occult began at least as early as his undergraduate years and that he came to London already primed on the occult. Many of his London acquaintances were unquestionably occultists.

The second section outlines a tripartite schema for "The Cantos" ("katabasis/dromena/epopteia") which, in turn, is applied to the poem. It is argued here that "The Cantos" is structured on the model of a initiation rather than a journey, and that the poem does not so much describe an initiation rite as enact one for the reader.

In exploring and attempting to understand Pounds' occultism and its implications to his Pounds'] oeuvre, Tryphonopoulos sheds new light upon one of the great works of modern Western literature.

This interdisciplinary collection explores the divergence or convergence of freedom and terror in a range of Byron's works. Challenging the binary opposition of historicism and critical theory, it combines topical debates in a manner that is sensitive both to the circumstances of their emergence and to their relevance for the twenty-first century.

Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative is a study of the varying relationships between verse and prose in a series of Old Norse-Icelandic saga narratives. It shows how the interplay of skaldic verse, with its metrical intricacy and cryptic diction, and saga prose, with its habitual spare clarity, can be used to achieve a wide variety of sophisticated stylistic and psychological effects. In sagas, there is a fundamental distinction between verses which are ostensibly quoted to corroborate what is stated in the narrative, and verses which are presented as the speech of characters in the saga. Corroborative verses are typical of, but not confined to, historical writings, the verses acting as a footnote to the narrative. Dialogue verses, with their illusion that saga characters break into verse at crucial points in the story, belong to the realm of fiction. This study, which focuses on historical writings such as Agrip and Heimskringla, and three of the major family sagas, Eyrbyggja saga, Gisla saga and Grettis saga, shows that a close reading of the prosimetrum in the narrative can be used to chart the complex and delicate boundaries between history and fiction in the sagas. When skaldic stanzas are presented as the dialogue of saga characters, the characteristic naturalism of these narratives is breached. But some saga authors, as this book shows, extend still further the expressiveness of saga narrative, presenting skaldic stanzas as the soliloquies of saga characters. This technique enables the direct articulation of emotion, and hence dramatic focalization of the narrative and the creation of psychological climaxes. As an epilogue, Heather O'Donoghue considers the absence ofsuch effects in Hrafnkels saga--a highly literary narrative without verses.

Richard Bradford's new introduction to poetry begins with and answers the slippery question, 'what is poetry?'. The book provides a compact history of English poetry from the 16th century to the present day and surveys the major critical and theoretical approaches to verse. It tackles the important issues of gender, race and nationality and concludes with a lengthy account of how to recognise good poetry. This engaging and readable book is accessible to all readers, from those who simply enjoy poetry through university first years to graduate students. Poetry: The Ultimate Guide provides the technical and critical tools you need to approach and evaluate poetry, and to articulate your own views.

This classic edition of Donne's Divine Poems contains an extensive and invaluable critical apparatus by Helen Gardner.

From the publication of his first major volume in 1946, "Lord Weary's Castle, " to a few years before his death in 1977, Robert Lowell held sway as the premier English-language poet of his time. "Lord Weary's Castle" seemed to push poetic language and cultural critique in exciting new directions, yet they were directions sanctioned by the New Criticism of his time. In 1959, Lowell's "Life Studies" dramatically broke the very traditions he had previously revitalized. During the 1960s, his works elaborated his new poetic mode and engaged with personal, political, and historical issues. But with the 1973 publication of his poetic trilogy, "History, For Lizzie and Harriet, " and "The Dolphin, " his reputation suffered. Though his final work, the autobiographical "Day by Day"--published shortly before his death in 1977--was favorably received, critics continued to attack him in the decades that followed.

Thus Lowell's reputation, as this volume makes clear, has fluctuated, and at the close of the twentieth century, there is still no critical consensus about any aspect of his work. This book provides a representative sample of the critical discourse concerning Lowell's poetry, drama, and prose, and shows that discourse at its most varied and vital. An introductory essay surveys the response to Lowell's writings. The first three sections then track Lowell's volumes chronologically. Most of his books receive one or two reviews followed by several scholarly essays, arranged in the order of their publication. Along with the reprinted articles are two essays written specifically for this volume. The fourth section presents several broad overviews of Lowell and his works, and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources concludes the book. The volume also contains an essay by Lowell himself, in which he reflects on his career.

This book argues that Romantic-era writers used the figure of the minstrel to imagine authorship as a social, responsive enterprise unlike the solitary process portrayed by Romantic myths of the lone genius. Simpson highlights the centrality of the minstrel to many important literary developments from the Romantic era through to the 1840s.