Amanda Gorman's powerful and historic poem 'The Hill We Climb,' read at President Joe Biden's inauguration, is now available as a collectible gift edition.

On 20 January 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Taking the stage after the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, Gorman captivated the nation and brought hope to viewers around the globe. Her poem "The Hill We Climb" can now be cherished in this special gift edition. Including an enduring foreword by Oprah Winfrey, this keepsake celebrates our promise and affirms the power of poetry.

Die Singende Hand: Versamelde Gedigte 1984 – 2014 is Breyten Breytenbach se derde versamelbundel.

Dit vorm ’n drieluik met die vorige twee bande, Ysterkoei-Blues en Die Ongedanste Dans.

In Gode van Papier poog die digter om gestalte te gee aan die moderne mens se gode: gode (ook buite die tradisionele sin van die woord) met voete van klei wat op hul plek gesit en gehou word.

Hoewel die woord "gode" dikwels in die bundel gebruik word, dui dit baie keer nie op gode in die tradisionele sin van die woord nie.

Allerlei dinge, tot die gedigte self, word gode in hierdie bundel.

Taking its title from Faulkner's epochal modernist novel, David Sherman's study traces the myriad ways death and its effect on the living defined modernist fiction and verse in England, Ireland, and the U.S. A focus on the disturbing but recurring image of the corpse allows Sherman to consider a range of texts marked by their sense of mortal fragility. Wilfred Owen's war poetry and Virginia Woolf's early novel Jacob's Room illustrate an incipient anxiety over new governmental techniques for efficiently managing the burial of the dead during World War I. Joyce's Ulysses and As I Lay Dying offer opportunities to consider narratives organized by the problem of an unburied corpse. Eliot's The Waste Land and Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood, which Eliot edited, demonstrate how modernist writers often respond to death and the loss of corporality with erotic encounters at the moment mortality is most threatened. Two poems by William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, in the monograph's concluding section, provide emblems for competing attitudes toward the disposal of the dead in the first half of the twentieth century. Enriched by insights from psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, In a Strange Room presents a richly textured transatlantic study of a defining aspect of modernist literature and culture.

Poetic Conventions as Cognitive Fossils offers a major theoretical statement of where poetic conventions come from. The work comprises Reuven Tsur's research in cognitive poetics to show how conventional poetic styles originate from cognitive rather than cultural principles. The book contrasts two approaches to cultural conventions in general, and poetic conventions in particular. They include what may be called the "culture-begets-culture" or "influence-hunting" approach, and the "constraints-seeking" or "cognitive-fossils" approach here expounded. The former assumes that one may account for cultural programs by pointing out their roots in earlier cultural phenomena and provide a map of their migrations. The latter assumes that cultural programs originate in cognitive solutions to adaptation problems that have acquired the status of established practice. Both conceptions assume "repeated social transmission," but with very different implications. The former frequently ends in infinite regress; the latter assumes that in the process of repeated social transmission, cultural programs come to take forms which have a good fit to the natural constraints and capacities of the human brain. Tsur extends the principles of this analysis of cognitive origins of poetic form to the writing systems, not only of the Western world, but also to Egyptian hieroglyphs through the evolution of alphabetic writing via old Semitic writing, and Chinese and Japanese writings; to aspects of figuration in medieval and Renaissance love poetry in English and French; to the metaphysical conceit; to theories of poetic translation; to the contemporary theory of metaphor; and to slips of the tongue and the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, showing the workings and disruption of psycholinguistic mechanisms. Analysis extends to such varying sources as the formulae of some Mediaeval Hebrew mystic poems, and the ballad 'Edward,' illustrative of extreme 'fossilization' and the constraints of the human brain.

Composed towards the end of the first century CE, Statius' Thebaid relates the myth of the 'Seven against Thebes': the assault of the seven champions of Argos on the ancient city in a bid to oust Eteocles, son of Oedipus, from his throne in favour of his brother, Polynices. Book 2 presents several key events in the build-up to the Theban war: Eteocles' haunting by the ghost of his grandfather Laius, the ill-omened weddings of Polynices and his ally Tydeus to the princesses of Argos, and Tydeus' failed embassy to Eteocles, leading to his famed victory over a Theban ambush. This volume represents the first full-length scholarly commentary in English on Book 2 of the twelve-book Latin epic, greatly expanding on and updating Mulder's 1954 Latin language commentary. An extensive introduction covers the poem's historical, textual, and literary contexts, with particular attention to Statius' adaptation of prior literary tradition and especially the epics of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Valerius Flaccus, and Silius Italicus. The Latin text, accompanied by a clear translation and apparatus criticus, is newly edited to take advantage of the recent detailed editorial work on the poem by Hall, Ritchie, and Edwards and is supplemented by a comprehensive and incisive line-by-line commentary which addresses a range of textual, linguistic, and literary topics. The result is a keenly focused yet accessible critical edition that will be of interest both to specialist scholars of Latin poetry and to advanced graduate students studying Flavian epic.

Robert Herrick has long been one of the best loved of English lyric poets. Known through the centuries as the author of 'Gather ye rosebuds', he also wrote, as this new edition shows, hundreds of songs, epigrams and longer poems equally worthy of attention. Volume I of this new edition of Herrick's work contains Hesperides, Herrick's only published collection. As well as the commentary on Hesperides, volume II contains the fifty-nine surviving manuscript poems which can be firmly attributed to Herrick, and on which his reputation was based before 1648. It is an ambitious and original attempt to recover for the first time the history of Herrick's corpus of manuscript poetry, and to identify how his poems circulated, and who his copyists and readers were. By establishing the type of sources to which they had access and the nature and quality of the poems these sources contained, and through the histories of transmission that accompany every poem, this volume offers a significant body of evidence that deepens our critical understanding not only of Herrick's poetry, but of the mechanics of scribal publication and the culture of reading, writing and performing poetry and music in early modern England. Where, as is often the case, a musical setting survives this is also printed, along with a commentary on the setting, in a form which is designed to encourage the performance of the lyrics.

This is the first edition for fifty years of one of the greatest of English lyric poets. Volume I concentrates on Herrick's large printed collection, Hesperides, published in 1648, and the product of nearly four decades of writing. The text is based on a collation of all fifty-seven known surviving copies of Hesperides. In addition it includes a much needed new biography, covering the suicide of his father, his apprenticeship as a goldsmith-banker, and his subsequent career in Cambridge, London, and Devon. It provides a survey of Herrick's fluctuating critical reputation-from 'the first in rank and station of English song-writers' to 'trivially charming'-and a detailed reconstruction of the original printing and publishing, just after the first Civil War, of a book which was the first 'Complete Works' to be published by an English poet. There is also a newly ordered sequence of Herrick's letters from Cambridge, his only surviving prose. An extensive commentary on Hesperides is placed in Volume II so that readers can use it side by side with the poems if they wish. The commentary gives new translations of Herrick's hundreds of classical allusions, and quotes his equally numerous Biblical ones, both of them far more extensive, and frequently far more playful, than has hitherto been realised. It also notes many parallels between Herrick's work and that of contemporaries, especially Jonson, Shakespeare, Burton, and John Fletcher, and his habit of echoing or quoting himself, a tendency which reinforces the strong sense of Herrick's persona dominating the collection. Full explanations are given of contemporary personal, political, and cultural references.

The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms expands the scope of modernism beyond its traditional focus to explore the contributions of artists from regions like Spain, the Balkans, China, Japan, India, Vietnam, and Nigeria. Together, these essays offer the most comprehensive worldwide examination of modernist studies available. Topics covered include: Richard Wright and photographic modernism; poetry of the Caribbean; Chinese modernism and Lu Xun's Ah Q-The Real Story; Ben Okri and magical realism; aesthetic autonomy in Paris, Italy, Russia; Cuba's avant-gardes; geography of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism in Europe; Japanese modernism in works by Kitagawa Fuyuhiko and Yokomitsu Riichi; and South African cinema.

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism offers twenty-eight original essays about an important genre that typically depicts human beings as the product of biological and environmental forces over which they have little control. Drawing upon recent scholarship as well as innovations in cultural studies, contributors offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of a genre that included writers from Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London to Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Joyce Carol Oates, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo. Organized by topic and theme, essays explore the contexts that prompted the origins of the genre, the problem of definition and the interconnections with other genres, and the scientific and philosophical background. Others examine the tensions with the genre-the role of women and African-American writers, depictions of sexuality, the problem of race, the critique of commodity culture and class, and the continuing presence of naturalism in twentieth- and twenty-first century fiction. Contributors also consider the role of the marketplace in the development of naturalism as well as the popular and critical response and the influence of naturalism in the other arts.

In the mid-eleventh century, secular Byzantine poetry attained a hitherto unseen degree of wit, vividness, and personal involvement, chiefly exemplified in the poetry of Christophoros Mitylenaios, Ioannes Mauropous, and Michael Psellos. This is the first volume to consider this poetic activity as a whole, critically reconsidering modern assumptions about Byzantine poetry, and focusing on Byzantine conceptions of the role of poetry in society. By providing a detailed account of the various media through which poetry was presented to its readers, and by tracing the initial circulation of poems, this volume takes an interest in the Byzantine reader and his/her reading habits and strategies, allowing aspects of performance and visual representation, rarely addressed, to come to the fore. It also examines the social interests that motivated the composition of poetry, establishing a connection with the extraordinary social mobility of the time. Self-representative strategies are analyzed against the background of an unstable elite struggling to find moral justification, which allows the study to raise the question of patronage, examine the discourse used by poets to secure material rewards, and explain the social dynamics of dedicatory epigrams. Finally, gift exchange is explored as a medium that underlines the value of poetry and confirms the exclusive nature of intellectual friendship.

Aeschylus' Persae, first produced in 472 BC, is the oldest surviving Greek tragedy. It is also the only extant Greek tragedy that deals, not with a mythological subject, but with an event of recent history, the Greek defeat of the Persians at Salamis in 480 BC. Unlike Aeschylus' other surviving plays, it is apparently not part of a connected trilogy. In this new edition A. F. Garvie encourages the reader to assess the Persae on its own terms as a drama. It is not a patriotic celebration, or a play with a political manifesto, but a genuine tragedy, which, far from presenting a simple moral of hybris punished by the gods, poses questions concerning human suffering to which there are no easy answers. In his Introduction Garvie defends the play's structure against its critics, and considers its style, the possibility of thematic links between it and the other plays presented by Aeschylus on the same occasion, its staging, and the state of the transmitted text. The Commentary develops in greater detail some of the conclusions of the Introduction.

Locating John Milton's works in national and international contexts, and applying a variety of approaches from literary to historical, philosophical, and postcolonial, Milton and Toleration offers a wide-ranging exploration of how Milton's visions of tolerance reveal deeper movements in the history of the imagination. Milton is often enlisted in stories about the rise of toleration: his advocacy of open debate in defending press freedoms, his condemnation of persecution, and his criticism of ecclesiastical and political hierarchies have long been read as milestones on the road to toleration. However, there is also an intolerant Milton, whose defence of religious liberty reached only as far as Protestants. This book of sixteen essays by leading scholars analyses tolerance in Milton's poetry and prose, examining the literary means by which tolerance was questioned, observed, and became an object of meditation. Organized in three parts, 'Revising Whig Accounts, ' 'Philosophical Engagements, ' 'Poetry and Rhetoric, ' the contributors, including leading Milton scholars from the USA, Canada, and the UK, address central toleration issues including heresy, violence, imperialism, republicanism, Catholicism, Islam, church community, liberalism, libertinism, natural law, legal theory, and equity. A pan-European perspective is presented through analysis of Milton's engagement with key figures and radical groups. All of Milton's major works are given an airing, including prose and poetry, and the book suggests that Milton's writings are a significant medium through which to explore the making of modern ideas of tolerance.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry gives readers a cutting-edge introduction to the kaleidoscopic world of American poetry over the last century. Offering a comprehensive approach to the debates that have defined the study of American verse, the twenty-five original essays contained herein take up a wide array of topics: the influence of jazz on the Beats and beyond; European and surrealist influences on style; poetics of the disenfranchised; religion and the national epic; antiwar and dissent poetry; the AIDS epidemic; digital innovations; transnationalism; hip hop; and more. Alongside these topics, major interpretive perspectives such as Marxist, psychoanalytic, disability, queer, and ecocritcal are incorporated. Throughout, the names that have shaped American poetry in the period--Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Sterling Brown, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Posey, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Larry Eigner, and others--serve as touchstones along the tour of the poetic landscape.

Nothing was more important to Wordsworth than tracing the evidence that affinities had been preserved between all the stages of the life of man. In this beautifully written and thoughtful book Wordsworth's biographer and editor Stephen Gill explores the ways in which the poet attempted as an artist to maintain such continuities and shows how revisitings of various kinds are at the heart of his creativity. Habitually reviewing all of his work, both published and that still in manuscript, Wordsworth painstakingly revised at the level of verbal detail or recast it more largely. New poems frequently emerged from re-engagement with old, often serving as a sequel to or commentary from the maturer poet on his own earlier creation, and acts of self-borrowing and self-reference are plentiful. These linkings provide insights into the powerful vision the poet maintained that his imaginative creation was one evolving unity and reveal much about the obsessions and drives of the great poet. Combining textual analysis, critical commentary, and biographical narrative, Gill explores what binds Wordsworth's later, less well-known poems to his earlier work. At the centre of the book is an account of the evolution of The Prelude from 1804 to 1839, in which it is argued that Wordsworth's masterpiece must be followed through all its versions, seen as a poem growing old alongside its creator.

Ideographic Modernism offers a critical account of the ideograph (Chinese writing as imagined in the West) as a modernist invention. Rather than focusing on the accuracy of this ideograph as a kind of representation of China (a focus that would yield predictable results), Christopher Bush reconstructs the specific history of the ideograph in order to explore the question of representation in more fundamental ways, ways that reflect the diversity and complexity of literary modernism itself.
On one level, the book makes an argument about the meaning and function of the ideograph during the modernist period, namely that this imagined Chinese writing was a complex response to the various writings of such technological media as the photograph, the phonograph, the cinematograph, and the telegraph. Through analyses of works by Claudel, Pound, Kafka, Benjamin, Segalen, and Valery, among others, Ideographic Modernism traces the interweaving of Western modernity's ethnographic and technological imaginaries, in which the cultural effects of technological media assumed "Chinese" forms, even as traditional representations of "the Orient" lived on in modernist-era responses to media.
On another level, the book makes a methodological argument, demonstrating new ways of recovering the generally overlooked presence of China in the text of Western modernism. In addition to being its subject matter, then, ideographic modernism is also the book's method: a polemically "literal" way of reading that calls for reevaluations both of how modernist literature related to its historical contexts and of the ways in which we can understand that relationship today."

Pastoralist traditions have long been extraordinarily important to the social, economic, political, and cultural life of the
region of western India called Maharashtra. The Marathi-language oral literature of the Dhangar shepherds of
Maharashtra is not only one of the most important elements of their own traditional cultural life, but also a treasure of
world literature. This volume presents two lively and well-crafted examples of the ovi, a genre typical of the oral literature of Dhangars. The two ovis in the volume narrate the stories of Biroba and Dhuloba, two of the most important gods of Dhangar shepherds. Each of the ovis tells an elaborate story of the birth of the god--a miraculous and complicated process in both cases--and of the struggles each one goes through in order to find and win his bride. The extensive introduction provides a literary analysis of the ovis and discusses what they reveal about the cosmology, geography, society, administrative structures, and economy of their performers' world, and about the performers views of pastoralistsand women.

The dithyramb, a choral song associated mostly with the god Dionysos, is the longest-surviving form of collective performance in Greek culture, lasting in its shifting shapes from the seventh century BC into late antiquity. Yet it has always stood in the shadow of its more glamorous relations - tragedy, comedy, and the satyr-play. This volume, with contributions from international experts in the field, is the first to look at dithyramb in its entirety, understanding it as an important social and cultural phenomenon of Greek antiquity.
Dithyramb in Context explores the idea that the dithyramb is much more than a complex poetic form: the history of the dithyramb is a history of changing performance cultures which form part of a continuous social process. How the dithyramb functions as a marker, as well as a carrier, of social change throughout Greek antiquity is expressed in themes as various as performance and ritual, poetics and intertextuality, music and dance, and history and politics. Drawing together literary critics, historians of religion, archaeologists, epigraphers, and historians, this volume applies a wide historical and geographical framework, scrutinizing the poetry and, for the first time, giving due weight to the evidence of epigraphy and the visual arts.

Coleridge and Contemplation is a multi-disciplinary volume on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, founding poet of British Romanticism, critic, and author of philosophical, political, and theological works. In his philosophical writings, Coleridge developed his thinking about the symbolizing imagination, a precursor to contemplation, into a theory of contemplation itself, which for him occurs in its purest form as a manifestation of 'Reason'. Coleridge is a particularly challenging figure because he was a thinker in process, and something of an omnimath, a Renaissance man of the Romantic era. The dynamic quality of his thinking, the 'dark fluxion' pursued but ultimately 'unfixable by thought', and his extensive range of interests make a philosophical yet also multi-disciplinary approach to Coleridge essential. This book is the first collection to feature philosophers and intellectual historians writing on Coleridge's philosophy. This volume opens up a neglected aspect of the work of Britain's greatest philosopher-poet - his analysis of contemplation, which he considered the highest of human mental powers. Philosophers including Roger Scruton, David E. Cooper, Michael McGhee, Andy Hamilton, and Peter Cheyne contribute original essays on the philosophical, literary, and political implications of Coleridge's views. The volume is edited and introduced by Peter Cheyne, and Baroness Mary Warnock contributes a foreword. The chapters by philosophers are supported by new developments in philosophically minded criticism from leading Coleridge scholars in English departments, including Jim Mays, Kathleen Wheeler, and James Engell. They approach Coleridge as an energetic yet contemplative thinker concerned with the intuition of ideas and the processes of cultivation in self and society. Other chapters, from intellectual historians and theologians, including Douglas Hedley clarify the historical background, and 'religious musings', of Coleridge's thought regarding contemplation.

This is a collection of studies on ancient (especially Latin) poetry and historiography, concentrating especially on the impact of rhetoric on both genres, and on the importance of considering the literature to illuminate the historical Roman context and the historical context to illuminate the literature. It takes the form of a tribute to Tony Woodman, Gildersleeve Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia, for whom twenty-one scholars have contributed essays reflecting the interests and approaches that have typified Woodman's own work. The authors that he has continuously illuminated - especially Velleius, Horace, Virgil, Sallust, and Tacitus - figure particularly prominently.

This collection of essays by an international group of scholars offers an account of Dante's reception in a wide range of media: visual art, literature, theatre, cinema, and music, from the late eighteenth century through to the early twentieth. It thus explores various appropriations and interpretations of his works and persona during the era of modernization in Europe, the United States, and beyond. It includes work by internationally recognized experts and a new generation of scholars in the field, and the eighteen essays are grouped in sections which relate both to themes and regions. The volume begins and ends by addressing Italy's reception of the national poet, and its other main sections show how a worldwide dialogue with Dante developed in France, Britain, Germany, the United States, Ireland, India, and Turkey. The whole collection demonstrates how this dialogue explicitly or implicitly informed the construction, recovery or re-definition of cultural identity among various nations, regions and ethnic groups during the 'long nineteenth century'. It not only aims at wide coverage of the period's voices and concerns, and includes discussion of well-known writers such as Ugo Foscolo, Giosue Carducci, Mary Shelley, John Ruskin, George Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton and Ralph Waldo Emerson - along with a large number of significant but less familiar figures. It also emphasizes the importance of a multidisciplinary and multilingual approach to the subject of Dante and nineteenth-century nationalism, and it will thus be of interest to scholars and students in comparative literary and nineteenth-century studies, as well as to those with a general interest in cultural studies and the history of ideas.

The sudden and spectacular growth in Dante's popularity in England at the end of the eighteenth century was immensely influential for English writers of the period. But the impact of Dante on English writers has rarely been analysed and its history has been little understood. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Blake, and Wordsworth all wrote and painted while Dante's work - its style, project, and achievement - commanded their attention and provoked their disagreement. The Circle of Our Vision discusses each of these writers in detail, assessing the nature of their engagement with the Divine Comedy and the consequences for their own writing. It explores how these Romantic poets understood Dante, what they valued in his poetry and why, setting them in the context of contemporary commentators, translators, and illustrators, (including Fuseli, Flaxman, and Reynolds) both in England and Europe. Romantic readings of the Divine Comedy are shown to disturb our own ideas about Dante, which are based on Victorian and Modernist assumptions. Pite also presents a reconsideration of the concept of 'influence' in general, using the example of Dante's presence in Romantic poetry to challenge Harold Bloom's belief that the relations between poets are invariably a fight to the death.

Langland's Piers Plowman is a profoundly Christian poem which nevertheless has enjoyed a wide general appeal. Readers - both religious and non-religious - have been drawn by the power of Langland's fictive imagination, the rich variety of imaginary worlds in his great dream-poem. Langland's Fictions examines the construction of the ten dreams which make up the B Text of Pears Plowman, and explores the relation of these dream-fictions to those realities with which the poet was chiefly preoccupied. This relationship is discussed under three main headings: 'fictions of the divided mind', in which the poet's mixed feelings about matters such as the value of learning find expression in imagined scenes and actions; 'fictions of history', in which the main events of salvation history are relived in the parallel worlds of dream; and 'fictions of the self', in which Langland's doubtful sense of his own moral standing as a man and a poet apparently finds expression. This chapter also addresses the controversial question of 'autobiographical elements' in the poem. John Burrow's lively and considered study is a major contribution to our understanding of one of medieval literature's most enduring works.

The Oxford Handbook of John Donne presents scholars with the history of Donne studies and provides tools to orient scholarship in this field in the twenty-first century and beyond. Though profoundly historical in its orientation, the Handbook is not a summary of existing knowledge but a resource that reveals patterns of literary and historical attention and the new directions that these patterns enable or obstruct.
Part I -- Research resources in Donne Studies and why they they matter -- emphasizes the heuristic and practical orientation of the Handbook, examining prevailing assumptions and reviewing the specialized scholarly tools available. This section provides a brief evaluation and description of the scholarly strengths, shortcomings, and significance of each resource, focusing on a balanced evaluation of the opportunities and the hazards each offers.
Part II -- Donne's genres -- begins with an introduction that explores the significance and differentiation of the numerous genres in which Donne wrote, including discussion of the problems posed by his overlapping and bending of genres. Essays trace the conventions and histories of the genres concered and study the ways in which Donne's works confirm how and why his "fresh invention" illustrates his responses to the literary and non-literary contexts of their composition.
Part III -- Biographical and historical contexts -- creates perspective on what is known about Donne's life; shows how his life and writings epitomized and affected important controversial issues of his day; and brings to bear on Donne studies some of the most stimulating and creative ideas developed in recent decades by historians of early modern England.
Part IV -- Problems of literary interpretation that have been traditionally and generally important in Donne Studies -- introduces students and researchers to major critical debates affecting the reception of Donne from the 17th through to the 21st centuries.

The Wordsworth volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series is the most comprehensive selection currently available of the poetry and prose of one of the finest poets in the English language. The familiar poems from Wordsworth's 'Great Decade' are all included, but they are complemented by a more than usually generous selection of the best poems from his later years. The extracts from the Guide to the Lakes will be a revelation to many readers, as will the political prose of the Convention of Cintra. All of the material is presented in chronological sequence, so that the reader can see how Wordsworth's changing concerns were expressed in prose as well as poetry. Work which Wordsworth published is separated from that which he did not reveal, which will enable the reader to trace through successive published volumes the development of Wordsworth's public poetic self, while also being able to follow the growth of the body of poetry which, for whatever reason, Wordsworth did not choose to make public when it was written - The Prelude being the greatest and most obvious example.