Of interest to interdisciplinary historians as well as those in various other fields, this book presents the first publication of 14 poems ranging from 12 to 3,000 lines. The poems are printed in the chronological order of their composition, from Elizabethan to Augustan times, but nine of them are verse translations of works from earlier periods in the development of alchemy. Each has a textual and historical introduction and explanatory note by the Editor. Renaissance alchemy is acknowledged as an important element in the histories of early modern science and medicine. This book emphasises these poems' expression of and shaping influence on religious, social and political values and institutions of their time too and is a useful reference work with much to offer for cultural studies and literary studies as well as science and history.

This book takes up the utopian desire for a perfect language of words giving direct expression to the real, known in Western thought as Cratylism, and its impact on the social visions and poetic projects of three of the most intellectually ambitious of American writers: Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson. A coda looks at the work of the Language writers, who carry forward this tradition in surprising ways. Based on close readings of theoretical and poetic texts, and drawing on archival research, this book makes two basic claims: that belief in an intrinsic relationship between words and things is linked in American poetry to utopian social projects; and that poets with a deep understanding of how language operates are nonetheless attracted to this belief--despite recognizing its fantastic elements--because it allows them to articulate a social mandate for poetry.

WINNER OF THE PROSE AWARD FOR LITERATURE, LANGUAGE, AND LINGUISTICS

The two principal questions that "The City of Translation" sets out to answer are: how did poetry, philology, catechesis, and literary translation legitimate a coterie of right-wing literati's rise to power in Colombia? And how did these men proceed to dismantle a long-standing liberal-democratic state without derogating basic constitutional freedoms? To answer those questions, Jose Maria Rodriguez Garcia investigates the emergence, development, and decline of what he calls "the reactionary city of translation"--a variation on, and a correction to, Angel Rama's understanding of the nineteenth-century "lettered city" as a primarily liberal and modernizing project. "The City of Translation" makes the tropes of ""translatio"" the conceptual nucleus of a comprehensive analysis that cuts across academic disciplines, ranging from political philosophy and the history of concepts to the relationship of literature to religious doctrine and the law.

Focusing on Shelley's 'Italian experience', the present study both addresses itself to the living context which nurtured Shelley's creativity, and explores a neglected but essential component of his work. The poet's four years of self-exile in Italy (1818-1822) were, in fact, the most decisive of his career. As he responded to Italy, his poetry acquired a new subtlety and complexity of vision. Endowed with remarkably keen powers of absorption, the poet imaginatively reshaped the rich cultural heritage of Italy and the vital qualities of its landscape and climate.

The first modern study of Hartley Coleridge, showing that he deserves our attention not as the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but as a literary presence in his own right.

The poet Mak Dizdar has become a cultural icon in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina. Inspired by the lapidary imagery and epitaphs of medieval Bosnian tombstones, his best-acclaimed collection of poetry, Stone Sleeper, reawakens the medieval voices in the historical imagination of contemporary Bosnians. Amila Buturovic looks at Stone Sleeper 's recovery of the ancestral world as an effort to refashion the sentiments of collective belonging. In treating the medieval tombstones as sites of collective memory, Dizdar’s poetry evokes new possibilities for Bosnians to cast aside national differences based on religion and embrace a pluralistic identity rooted in the sacred landscape of medieval Bosnia. The book includes a bilingual appendix of Dizdar's poetry with an introduction by the translator, Francis Jones.

Herman Sinaiko is renowned for his gifts as a guide to exploring and appreciating the humanities. This book brings to general readers Sinaiko's thoughts on, and invitations to read or reread, a wide selection of major literary and philosophical works -- from ancient Greek to Chinese to modern. Taking a conversational approach, he deals with the perennial questions that thinking people have always raised and investigates how works of great art may provide answers to these questions.

Sinaiko reestablishes the notion that there is a canon of great works from the great traditions of the world and argues for the existence of permanent standards of excellence. He rejects most contemporary critical views of classical literature and philosophy, including those of "experts" who seek to monopolize access to great works, academics whose extreme emphasis on historical context disallows any current relevance, and theorists whose lenses distort with personal bias rather than sharpen focus on the works they discuss. Sinaiko reclaims the canon for all of us, opening up discussion on texts ranging from Plato to Tolstoy, Confucius to Mary Shelley, and encouraging each reader to listen and respond to the rich diversity of powerful views on the human condition that such great works offer.

"Sinaiko's essays are interesting, provocative, thick like a good pudding, and contain much original thought. Plato, Confucius, Yeats, Nietzsche, and others -- a gala and stimulating Humanities course." -- Bennett Simon, M.D., Harvard Medical School

"The more one knows and has studied a work that Sinaiko addresses, the more one appreciates the depth and significance of what he has to say." -- Bruce A. Kimball, University of Rochester

It has often been noted that poetry is a particularly suitable medium when it comes to understanding the connection between theology and biography. Needless to say that this is particularly exciting in the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the poems he wrote during his imprisonment by the Nazis. Although any one of his ten poems should be read within their respective historical and biographical context, they are also rounded, self-sufficient pieces of work that cannot be 'explained' by the biographical and theological prose that surrounds them. They rather serve as a sort of creative and perhaps sometimes even critical interlocutor to these contexts. This is why the contributors to this volume have not been asked to explain the poems but to facilitate this conversation: the conversation between the reader and the poems, between the individual poems as well as between the poems and Bonhoeffer's life and his theology.These poems lend themselves ideally as an entry point into Bonhoeffer's theology in that each one of them resonates with a particular central theological concept that Bonhoeffer was developing in his prison years. Themes and concepts such as "friendship", "religion", "identity", "freedom", "representative action" and others are not only represented in these poems but often expressed in the dense and compelling fashion that only poetic language affords. As such, they certainly deserve the thorough and imaginative engagement by the international line-up of first-class theological authors gathered in this book.

In 1956, Anne Sexton was admitted into a mental hospital for post-partum depression, where she met Dr. Martin Orne, a young psychiatrist who treated her for the next eight years. In that time Sexton would blossom into a world-famous poet, best known for her "confessional" poems dealing with personal subjects not often represented in poetry at that time: mental illness, depression, suicide, sex, abortion, women's bodies, and the ordinary lives of mothers and housewives. Orne audiotaped the last three years of her therapy to facilitate her ability to remember their sessions. The final six months of these tapes are the focus of this book.

In An Accident of Hope, Dawn Skorczewski links the content of the therapy with poetry excerpts, offering a rare perspective on the artist's experience and creative process. We can see Sexton attempting to make sense of her life and therapy and to sustain her confidence as a major poet, while struggling with the impending loss of Orne, who was moving elsewhere. Skorczewski's study provides an intimate, in-depth view of the therapy of a psychologically tortured yet immensely creative woman, during a period of emerging feminism and cultural change. Tracing the mutual development of the poet and the therapist during their years together, the author explores the tension between the classical therapeutic setting as practiced in the early 1960s and contemporary relational and developmental concepts in psychoanalysis, just then beginning to emerge.

An Accident of Hope also raises broader questions about the nature of healing in psychotherapy. The poet and therapist we encounter in these sessions present complex and conflicted images of the therapeutic and creative process. Orne, equal parts honesty and hesitancy, works to bolster Sexton's self-image and maintain that she is more than the sum of her poetry. Sexton, working against a tendency to hide from her most painful feelings, valiantly pushes to tell the truth in therapy, while her poems invite the readers to see another side of the story.

Just as Orne kept the audiotapes so that one day they might help others who suffer, An Accident of Hope tells the story of a therapy but moves beyond it. By offering a glimpse into the past, the present is open for reappraisal, both of Sexton herself and the legacy of psychoanalytic treatment.

"Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in "New American" Poetry" examines the crucial, yet sometimes fraught connections between poets associated with Donald Allen's groundbreaking 1960 anthology, "The New American Poetry." Focusing in particular on pairings of writers within the larger grouping of poets, including Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Nathaniel Mackey, this book suggests how literary partnerships became pivotal to the writing, especially at early stages in these poets' careers. Mossin then goes on to examine the role that male friendship, rivalry, and camaraderie play in the production of poetic texts. "No one listens to poetry," Jack Spicer famously wrote. This book shows how a particular group of poets did listen to each other and what they made of what they heard.

William Blake has maintained an enduring popularity amongst a large and diverse audience as a poet, artist and engraver. There are probably more artists, writers, filmmakers and composers working under the influence of Blake than any other figure from the Romantic era.Radical Blake traces his influence and afterlife across a range of major themes such as Metropolitan Blake, Blake and Nationalism, and Blake and Women.

Did 1st century Mediterranean readers of the fourth Gospel have comparable literary examples to inform their comprehension of Moses as a character? In addressing this question, Harstine's study falls into two parts: the first is an analysis of the character Moses as utilized in the text of the fourth Gospel, and the second is an examination of other Hellenistic narrative texts, in which the character of Homer is also considered, as another important legendary figure with whom the readers of the fourth Gospel would have been familiar.

Arising from a research project on depression in the eighteenth century, this book discusses the experience of depressive states both in terms of existing modes of thought and expression, and of attempts to describe and live with suffering. It also asks what present-day society can learn about depression from the eighteenth-century experience.

This book investigates how subjectivity is encoded in the texts of a wide variety of medieval narratives and lyrics - not how they express the subjectivity of individuals, but how subjectivity, escaping the bounds of individuality, is incorporated in the linguistic fabric of their texts. Most of the poems discussed are in English, and the book includes analyses of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Man of Law's Tale, and Complaint Unto Pity, the works of the Pearl poet, Havelok the Dane, the lyric sequence attributed to Charles of Orleans (the earliest such sequence in English), and many anonymous poems. It also devotes sections to Ovid's Heroides and to poems by the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn. For the first time, it brings to bear on medieval narratives and lyrics a body of theory which denies the supposed necessity for literary texts to have narrators or 'speakers', and in doing so reveals the implausibilities into which a dogmatic assumption of this necessity has led much of the last century's criticism.

Written by a leading authority on William Carlos Williams, this book provides a wide-ranging and stimulating guide to twentieth-century American poetry.
A wide-ranging and stimulating critical guide to twentieth-century American poetry.
Written by a leading authority on the innovative modernist poet, William Carlos Williams.
Explores the material, historical and social contexts in which twentieth-century American poetry was produced.
Includes a biographical dictionary of major writers with extended entries on poets ranging from Robert Frost to Adrienne Rich.
Contains a section on key texts considering major works, such as 'The Waste Land', 'North & South', 'Howl' and 'Ariel'.
The final section draws out key themes, such as American poetry, politics and war, and the process of anthologizing at the end of the century.

How do readers approach the enigmatic and unnavigable modernist long poem? Taking as the form's exemplars the highly influential but critically contentious poetries of John Cage and Charles Olson, this book considers indeterminacy - the fundamental feature of the long poem - by way of its analogues in musicology, mycology, cybernetics and philosophy. It addresses features of these works that figure broadly in the long poem tradition, such as listing, typography, archives, mediation and mereology, while articulating how both poets broke with the longform poetic traditions of the early 1900s. Brendan C. Gillott argues for Cage's and Olson's centrality to these traditions - in developing, critiquing and innovating on the longform poetics of the past, their work revolutionized the longform poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries.

First published in 1965, this reissue of the second edition of T. R. Henn's seminal study offers an impressive breadth and depth of meditations on the poetry of W. B. Yeats. His life and influences are discussed at length, from the impact of the Irish Rebellion upon his youth, to his training as a painter, to the influence of folklore, occultism and Indian philosophy on his work. Henn seeks out the many elements of Yeats' famously complex personality, as well as analysing the dominant symbols of his work, and their ramifications.

As we approach the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, this timely reissue, first published in 1991, evaluates the function of poetry in wartime Europe, arguing that war poetry must be understood as a social as well as a literary phenomenon. As well as locating the work of well-known French, English and German war poets in a European context, Elizabeth Marsland discusses lesser-known poetry of the war years, including poems by women and the neglected tradition of civilian protest through poetry. Identifying shared characteristics as well as the unique features of each nation's poetry, The Nation's Cause affords new insight into the relationship between nationalism and the social attitudes that determined the conduct of war.

Debates about Irish culture have long been plagued by neat oppositions between conquering England and colonized Erin, Protestant and Catholic, stolid Saxon and dreamy Celt. Yet the greatest Irish poets have scorned such simplicities.

In this avowedly interpretative anthology of Irish verse, W.J. McCormack traces creativity of contradiction through several centuries, finding poets productively at odds with their forebears, their contemporaries--even with themselves. From Yeats's tragic laughter to the quieter ironies of Seamus Heaney, from the rambunctious narratives of Merriman and Joyce to the pathos of Wilde's "Reading Gaol," the same sparring spirit is found.

This exciting anthology brings together the very best in Irish poetry to reveal a broad yet sharply-focused tradition of diversity and dissidence. W.J. McCormack's compelling collection provokes a wide-ranging reconsideration of one of the world's richest literatures.