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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Poetry & poets
This books presents the first extended study of the relationship between British modernist poetry and the environment. Challenging reductive associations of modernism as predominantly anthropocentric in character and urban in focus, the book's central argument is that within British modernist poetry there is a clear and sustained interest in the natural world which has yet to receive adequate critical attention. Whilst modernist studies continues to emphasize the plurality of the movement and the breadth of voices and concerns within it, the environmental consciousness of modernist literature and its response to changes to human/nature relations following the experience of war and modernity remain largely unexamined. Exploring British modernist poetry from an ecocritical perspective offers a fresh approach to the movement and its context, and produces original readings of both canonical and more marginalized modernist voices. This book opens by discussing the relationship between modernism and ecocriticism and the benefits of creating a dialogue between the two. It then presents new readings of Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, and Charlotte Mew that reveal a shared preoccupation with environmental issues and a common desire to find new ways of achieving physical, psychological, and artistic reconnection with nature. Building on the continuing growth of ecocriticism, this book demonstrates how green approaches to modernist studies can produce new insights into both individual poets and the modernist movement as a whole, making it an essential resource for students of modernism, ecocriticism, and early-twentieth-century literature.
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.
Orality, Form, and Lyric Unity examines the poetic works of Michael Donaghy and Don Paterson and their advancement of a poetics of sound, sense, and language of meaning. Observing Donaghy's critical perspectives on orality, tradition, and memory, and Don Paterson's systems of collective relation and "lyric unity," this volume explores the intellectual curiosity of both poets from the classical to contemporary, perceived in music, literature, philosophy, scientific thought, and the rituals and austerities of the transcendent. This text also explores the tensions between craft and spontaneity, and between the intellect and intuition occupying their work, along with a fundamental respect for form as the poet's guiding principle. Investigating this overlap in critical perspective, Orality, Form, and Lyric Unity exposes persuasive rhetoric, and pursues a nuanced understanding of the enigmatic complexity of poetic language and its critical context. This volume interrogates valuable insights into form, language, and poetics, and clarifies and reframes these, with a focus on the creative process for readers interested in poetry and the informative nature of these works.
Written by internationally established scholars of Thomas Moore's music, poetry, and prose writing, Thomas Moore and Romantic Inspiration is a collection of twelve essays and a timely response to significant new biographical, historiographical and editorial work on Moore. This collection reflects the rich variety of cutting-edge work being done on this significant and prolific figure. Sarah McCleave and Brian Caraher have contributed an introduction that positions Moore in his own time (1800-1850), addresses subsequent neglect in the twentieth century, and contextualises the contemporary re-evaluation of Thomas Moore as a figure of considerable interdisciplinary artistic and cultural significance. The contributions to this collection establish Moore's importance in the fields of Neoclassical and Romantic lyricism, musical performance, song-writing, postcolonial criticism, Orientalism and biographical writing- as well as defining the significance of his voice as an engaged social and political commentator of a strongly cosmopolitan and pluralistic inclination.
Called by her contemporaries the "Tenth Muse," Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648-1695) has continued to stir both popular and scholarly imaginations. While generations of Mexican schoolchildren have memorized her satirical verses, only since the 1970s has her writing received consistent scholarly attention., focused on complexities of female authorship in the political, religious, and intellectual context of colonial New Spain. This volume examines those areas of scholarship that illuminate her work, including her status as an iconic figure in Latin American and Baroque letters, popular culture in Mexico and the United States, and feminism. By addressing the multiple frameworks through which to read her work, this research guide serves as a useful resource for scholars and students of the Baroque in Europe and Latin America, colonial Novohispanic religious institutions, and women's and gender studies. The chapters are distributed across four sections that deal broadly with different aspects of Sor Juana's life and work: institutional contexts (political, economic, religious, intellectual, and legal); reception history; literary genres; and directions for future research. Each section is designed to provide the reader with a clear understanding of the current state of the research on those topics and the academic debates within each field.
The canon of classical Greek and Latin poetry is built around big names, with Homer and Virgil at the centre, but many ancient poems survive without a firm ascription to a known author. This negative category, anonymity, ties together texts as different as, for instance, the orally derived Homeric Hymns and the learned interpolation that is the Helen episode in Aeneid 2, but they all have in common that they have been maltreated in various ways, consciously or through neglect, by generations of readers and scholars, ancient as well as modern. These accumulated layers of obliteration, which can manifest, for instance, in textual distortions or aesthetic condemnation, make it all but impossible to access anonymous poems in their pristine shape and context. The essays collected in this volume attempt, each in its own way, to disentangle the bundles of historically accreted uncertainties and misconceptions that affect individual anonymous texts, including pseudepigrapha ascribed to Homer, Manetho, Virgil and Tibullus, literary and inscribed epigrams, and unattributed fragments. Poems without Poets will be of interest to students and scholars working on any anonymous ancient texts, but also to readers seeking an introduction to classical poetry beyond the limits of the established canon.
Exploring the diverse factors that persuaded Christopher Columbus that he could reach the fabled "East" by sailing west, Dante, Columbus and the Prophetic Tradition considers, first, the impact of Dante's Divine Comedy and the apocalyptic prophetic tradition that it reflects, on Columbus's perception both of the cosmos and the eschatological meaning of his journey to what he called an 'other world.' In so doing, the book considers how affinities between himself and the exiled poet might have led Columbus to see himself as a divinely appointed agent of the apocalypse and his enterprise as the realization of the spiritual journey chronicled in the Comedy. As part of this study, the book necessarily examines the cultural space that Dante's poem, its geography, cosmography and eschatology, enjoyed in late fifteenth century Spain as well as Columbus's own exposure to it. As it considers how Italian writers and artists of the late Renaissance and Counter Reformation received the news of Columbus' 'discovery' and appropriated the figure of Dante and the pseudo-prophecy of the Comedy to interpret its significance, the book examines how Tasso, Ariosto, Stradano and Stigliani, in particular, forge a link between Dante and Columbus to present the latter as an inheritor of an apostolic tradition that traces back to the Aeneid. It further highlights the extent to which Italian writers working in the context of the Counter Reformation, use a Dantean filter to propagate the notion of Columbus as a new Paul, that is, a divinely appointed apostle to the New World, and the Roman Church as the rightful emperor of the souls encountered there.
Testament is an imaginative improvisation on the Bible that engages with the intensities, the ups and downs, of existence in our complex and fragmented world. Psalter, the first part, comprises 150 psalm-like poems that sound the depths and heights of life lived in the presence of God. Here, shaped into powerful, accessible poetry, is the wisdom of a mature and practical faith that knows love, grief, doubt, fear, disappointment, and overwhelming delight and joy. Micheal O'Siadhail stretches heart, mind, and imagination to open up profound questions of God, suffering and aging, truth and trust, freedom and surprise, desire and love. There are passionate exchanges with God and daring leaps of insight. Through them all runs a gripping conversational relationship expressed in praise, thanks, lament, and distilled wisdom, embracing a dazzling variety of forms and rhythms. Gospel, the second part, retells in poetry stories from the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The emphasis is on the plain sense of the stories, newly imagined. We are invited to reread them, to discover insights and nuances, angles and depths, and above all to encounter afresh the familiar yet endlessly mysterious central character-Jesus. The world's bestselling book shows yet again its capacity to excite and inspire. O'Siadhail's acclaimed The Five Quintets engaged with the ways in which the arts, economics, politics, the sciences, philosophy, and theology have shaped our twenty-first-century world. Here in Testament is an imaginative faith and wise spirituality that can inspire day-to-day living in that world, revealed through the inner life and penetrating discernment of a great poet.
The Greek View of Poetry details critical theories and the appreciation of poetry by the ancient Greeks. Originally published in 1931, this text deals with a whole range of Greek critics from very early criticism to Longinus and his views on Homer in an attempt to provide a historical view of the importance of poetry to Greek society. This title will be of interest to students of Classics.
This set reissues 7 books on the Romantic poet Lord Byron originally published between 1957 and 2005. The volumes examine Byron's poetry, his poetic development, and his social and private life. Lord Byron's epic satiric poem Don Juan is examined by some of the leading scholars of Romanticism.
This set reissues 4 books on Victorian poetry originally published between 1966 and 2003. The volumes focus predominantly on the works of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. This set will be of particular interest to students of English literature.
This critical study explores the relationship between Hopkins' poetic art and his philosophy and shows why Hopkins' poetry has endured. Sean Sheehan is the author of a study of anarchism and of a guide to Wittgenstein.
Percy Shelley is widely considered one of the most important Romantic poets of the 19th Century and was a key influence on the Victorian and pre-Raphaelite poets in the century following his death in 1822. However, for many years his writing was largely ignored in the mainstream due to the radical politics he espoused and it is only in relatively recent times he has become universally admired. Routledge Library Editions: Percy Shelley collects a broad range of scholarship ranging from examinations of Shelley's style and political intentions to an assessment of his impact on the broader Romantic Movement. This set reissues 4 books on Percy Shelley originally published between 1945 and 2009 and will be of interest to students of literature and literary history.
This set reissues 10 books on T. S. Eliot originally published between 1952 and 1991. The volumes examine many of Eliot's most respected works, including his Four Quartets and The Waste Land. As well as exploring Eliot's work, this collection also provides a comprehensive analysis of the man behind the poetry, particularly in Frederick Tomlin's T. S. Eliot: A Friendship. This set will be of particular interest to students of literature.
This book provides an analytical understanding of some of Tagore's most contested and celebrated works and ideas. It reflects on his critique of nationalism, aesthetic worldview, and the idea of 'surplus in man' underlying his life and works. It discusses the creative notion of surplus that stands not for 'profit' or 'value', but for celebrating human beings' continuous quest for reaching out beyond one's limits. It highlights, among other themes, how the idea of being 'Indian' involves stages of evolution through a complex matrix of ideals, values and actions-cultural, historical, literary and ideological. Examining the notion of the 'universal', contemporary scholars come together in this volume to show how 'surplus in man' is generated over the life of concrete particulars through creativity. The work brings forth a social scientific account of Tagore's thoughts and critically reconstructs many of his epochal ideas. Lucid in analysis and bolstered with historical reflection, this book will be a major intervention in understanding Tagore's works and its relevance for the contemporary human and social sciences. It will interest scholars and researchers of philosophy, literature and cultural studies.
The practice of poetry in the Victorian period was characterised by an extreme diversity of styles, preoccupations and subject-matter. This anthology attempts to draw out some of the main focuses of interest in the Victorian poet. No Victorian poet produced an overall theory of poetry, yet all accepted it as a natural vehicle of expression, and for some subjects, in particular sexuality, the only literary mode. Indeed, the sexual question was made even more acute by the sudden phenomenon of the 'poetess', and the relation of poetry to gender raised interesting new critical questions. At the same time, the cultural role of the poet came under increasing debate: Victorian poetry was the first contemporary poetry to be studied. This selection of central texts illustrates these pressures on the Victorian practice of poetry, and the introductory remarks suggest ways in which theory can be related to the understanding key poems themselves.
First published in 1982, this book provides a descriptive and comparative study of some of the fundamental structural aspects of modernist poetic writing in English, French and German in the first decades of the twentieth century. The work concerns itself primarily with basic structural elements and techniques and the assumptions that underlie and determine the modernist mode of poetic writing. Particular attention is paid to the theories developed by authors and to the essential 'principles of construction' that shape the structure of their poetry. Considering the work of a number of modernist poets, Theo Hermans argues that the various widely divergent forms and manifestations of modernistic poetry writing can only be properly understood as part of one general trend.
In this critical and historical interpretation of Petrarch's major Italian work, the collection of poems he called the Rerum vulgarium fagmenta, Peter Hainsworth presents Petrarch as a poet of outstanding sophistication and seriousness, occupied with issues which are still central to debates about poetry and language. In the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta Petrarch reformed the received Italian tradition, creating a new kind of lyric poetry. In particular, he found solutions to the intellectual, linguistic and imaginative problems which Dante's Divine Comedy posed for the succeeding generation of poets. Petrarch the Poet illumines the complexities of Petrarch's poetic vision, which is simultaneously a form of autobiographical narrative, a poetic encyclopaedia and a meditation on the nature of poetry. The book will appeal to Italian specialists, to those interested in European poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and also to readers interested generally in the nature and function of poetry.
Stanley Lombardo's deft abridgment of his 2005 translation of the Aeneid preserves the arc and weight of Virgil's epic by presenting major books in their entirety and abridged books in extended passages seamlessly fitted together with narrative bridges. W. R. Johnson's Introduction, a shortened version of his masterly Introduction to that translation, will be welcomed by both beginning and seasoned students of the Aeneid , and by students of Roman history, classical mythology, and Western civilization.
It is impossible to appreciate poetry fully without some knowledge of the various aspects of poetic technique. First published in 1953, with a second edition in 1982, this title explains all the usual technical terms in an accessible manner. Marjorie Boulton shows that it is possible to approach a poem from a business-like perspective without losing enjoyment. This reissue will be of particular value to students as well as those with a general interest in the specifics of poetry.
In the postcolonial world, the claim to an emancipated national culture was bound to its aesthetic correlate, the unfolding time and experiments of the twentieth-century novel. Today, the constructs of both novel and a progressivist national project function, in all their closures, within global scales of economic disparity and violent exclusion. What is the fate of a literary canon when it is no longer capable of delineating a future - or otherwise, is bound to reproduce the failures of the past within its own inscriptions? How do we experience our current "globalist" moment, when lived inequities of gender, labour and ethnicity emerge in a text's inability to speak on time? When does artistic or literary failure become the measure of a work's accomplishment? And what sort of liberation is envisioned by works that refuse the imperatives of "progress" and "independence" - which embrace the appearance of obsolescence by rejecting values of artistic freedom, originality and innovation? These are some of the provocations that arise from T.W. Adorno's idea of late style for our own conjuncture - a properly postcolonial context, in which every conceptual or expressive engagement is articulated through an awareness of eroded national promise. Examining works by Rabindranath Tagore, Mulk Raj Anand, Vikram Seth and the photography of Dayanita Singh, Tania Roy examines the delayed claims of literary and artistic modernity in India through Adorno's category of late-style. In striking readings of Adorno and his interlocuters, the book extends a poetics of lateness toward a speculative history of the twentieth-century novel in India. Comprised of critically neglected selections from the oeuvres of canonical writers, Adorno and the Architects of Late Style in India proposes that under conditions of advanced capitalism, logics of redundancy overtake the novel's foundational reference point in the nation to produce altered frames of thought and sensibility - and therein, a reader who might encounter, anew, the figures of an unfulfilled twentieth century.
Hesiod, who lived in Boetia in the late eighth century BC, is one of the oldest known, and possibly the oldest of Greek poets. His Theogony contains a systematic genealogy of the gods from the beginning of the world and an account of the struggles of the Titans. In contrast, Works and Days is a compendium of moral and practical advice on husbandry, and throws unique and fascinating light on archaic Greek society. As well as offering the earliest known sources for the myths of Pandora, Prometheus and the Golden Age, Hesiod's poetry provides a valuable account of the ethics and superstitions of the society in which he lived. Unlike Homer, Hesiod writes about himself and his family, and he stands out as the first personality in European literature. This new translation, by a leading expert on the Hesiodic poems combines accuracy with readability. It is accompanied by an introduction and explanatory notes. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Dylan Thomas' work has been both over and under-rated. Peter Davies goes behind Thomas' overt poetizing to discriminate those poems that are of enduring interest. Peter Davies is Senior Obituaries Writer at 'The Time' and author of 'William Blake', 'The Brontes' and editor for this 'Greenwich Exchange' series. |
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