Ted Hughes is widely regarded as a major figure in twentieth-century poetry, but the impact of Hughes's class background on his work has received little attention. This is the first full length study to take the measure of the importance of class in Hughes. It presents a radically new version of Hughes that challenges the image of Hughes as primarily a nature poet, as well as the image of the Tory Laureate. The controversy over 'natural' violence in Hughes's early poems, Hughes's relationship with Seamus Heaney, the Laureateship, and Hughes's revisiting of his relationship with Sylvia Plath in Birthday Letters "(1998), are reconsidered in terms of Hughes's class background. Drawing on the thinking of cultural theorists such as Slavoj i ek, Terry Eagleton, and Julia Kristeva, the book presents new political readings of familiar Hughes poems, alongside consideration of posthumously collected poems and letters, to reveal a surprising picture of a profoundly class-conscious poet.

This bibliography provides a comprehensive record of verse drama in modern literature. The volume begins with an introduction, which discusses the significance of verse drama in modern theater, and which overviews the history and intent of modern verse drama. The bibliography that follows provides entries for more than 500 plays written in verse or in verse and prose between 1935 and 1992. Included are works by renowned playwrights such as T.S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, and John Arden, as well as plays by lesser-known dramatists. The plays are organized alphabetically by the name of the author. Included are anthologies of plays as well. Each entry is accompanied by an annotation that succinctly overviews the major themes and significance of the work. Title and subject index conclude the reference.

What do we mean by 'voice' in poetry? In this work, David Nowell Smith teases out the diverse meanings of 'voice', from a poem's soundworld to the rhetorical gestures through which poems speak to us, in order to embark on a philosophical exploration of the concept of voice itself.

A survey of poetry from Northern Ireland, the Republic, Britain and the USA. The five chapters of the book cover the 1950s, 1960s, the early troubles period to 1976, the 1980s and 1990s. Each poet is placed firmly within his or her historical and social contexts, with an emphasis on the response to the processes of modernisation, the representation of violence, poetic form and gender. While the distinctiveness of Northern and Southern poetries is respected, Irish poets are seen to be engaged in a continual process of cross-border exchange. Over 30 individual poets are dealt with, and in each case detailed readings of individual poems are given along with contextual material. While the major critical issues are addressed the book is primarily concerned to break with the small canon of texts and poets which tends to dominate discussions of the subject, and emphasizes a heterogeneity and diversity of achievement. It avoids the imposition of a single interpretation on a diverse body of writing and makes the case for a wider appraisal of Irish poetry which considers international and mainstream influences. It concludes with a discussion of poetry of the diaspora at a time of the fragile Northern Ireland ceasefire and the "Celtic Tiger" phenomenon in the Republic.

Ogden Nash was a rare poet. He celebrated the ordinary with delight and curiosity: husbands and wives at work, children at play, a society in motion. He studied popular culture with a penetrating eye and wrote about America, its icons, habits, and affectations with humor and levity. He struggled with comparisons to serious poets, those heroes of the canon who abandoned the rhyme and meter that Nash found crucial to his style of writing. His witty, insightful, and graceful vignettes captured those moments in life that defy heavy-handed treatment. Nash did not live out the stereotype of the aloof poet-recluse. In addition to his writing, Nash pursued publishing, screenwriting, and a rigorous lecture circuit. This self-styled poet of wide appeal appeared in newspapers and magazines found in homes across the country, accessible publications such as Life, The New Yorker, Cosmopolitan, Sports Illustrated, Reader s Digest, and McCall s. At a time when children s literature meant Winnie-the-Pooh, Nash produced verses for and about young people that amused, educated, and more important, didn t pander or lecture. These poems and collections, including Custard the Dragon, The New Nutcracker Suite and Other Innocent Verses, A Boy Is a Boy, and Girls Are Silly, were classics of the genre. Nash left behind an invaluable body of work: charming, clever, and utterly unique."

"Reframing Yeats," the first critical study of its kind, uses a focus on genre and allusion to engage with a broad range of W. B. Yeats's writings, examining instances of his poetry, autobiographical writings, criticism, and drama. Identifying a schism in recent Yeatsian criticism between biographical and formalist methodologies, Armstrong's study combines an historicist perspective with close attention to literary form. The result is a flexible approach that casts new light on how Yeats's texts interact with their interpretative frameworks. Cognizant of both literary and political history, this book presents new interpretations of Yeats's work. Not only does it provide fresh readings of texts such as "The Municipal Gallery Re-visited," "Among School Children" and The Resurrection, but it also raises important new questions concerning Yeats's relationship to Modernism and literary genre.

Within the pantheon of world literature, the Persian poet Hafiz (born in around 1320 in the city of Shiraz) occupies an exalted position, and his poems have long been translated and studied in the West. However, the degree of the English language's "interaction" with the work of Hafiz has often been underestimated. Parvin Loloi's contribution has been to collect and analyse the entire body of translations of Hafiz in English and to identify the specific problems which his writing presents to translators, together with varying strategies adopted by translators to surmount these difficulties. Her book includes a comprehensive first-line index of English translations of individual poems of Hafiz: a rich resource for students of comparative literature or translation studies, which demonstrates widespread and long-established interest in one of the major poets of Persia. It points to cultural encounters which the debate on Orientalism has largely ignored and highlights a significant influence on English poets of the 19th century, including Byron and Tennyson.

One of the most important playwrights of the Irish Renaissance, John Millington Synge is receiving renewed attention as his works are reread in light of the political and cultural contexts of his time. This book argues that his plays are far more deeply rooted, thematically and aesthetically, in the ancient native literature than was previously believed. It demonstrates that Synge borrowed themes and ideology from the ancient culture, serving as a nationalist agenda far more radical and modern than the agendas of the most common nationalists in his day. Synge rejects these nationalists, whom he believed were embracing foreign influences that were drowning Ireland in conservatively capitalistic initiatives and values.

The book's most important section examines DEGREESIThe Playboy of the Western World. DEGREESR It discusses the play's characters as representative and recognizable types and reconsiders the play's thematic depiction of violence. Synge's representation of both commenced the process of separating and identifying the nationalist camps in Dublin from 1907 on. The volume argues that Synge's play drafted what became the Easter Rising. This argument is furthered through Synge's DEGREESIDeirdre of the Sorrows DEGREESR and the influence that his works ultimately bore on the plays and ideologies of Thomas MacDonagh, Padaraic Pearse, and James Connolly. The book also explores the acting style originally used to perform Synge's plays, thus gathering further evidence for its argument.

Sydney Goodsir Smith, Poet: Essays on His Life and Work offers the first substantial work to assess his life and writings since his premature death in 1975. Considered a major figure in the second wave of Hugh MacDiarmid's 'Scottish Literary Renaissance', Smith's unique body of work has largely fallen from critical discussion of post-war Scottish literature. This book remedies this by showing how his work may have fallen out of favour, and then by reappraising his distinctive and varied achievements in poetry, drama, art and art criticism, the novel and translations. Early career and established academics explore the many strands of his work as the best way of giving this multifaceted literary figure renewed attention.

Through an examination of the poetry of Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa,We Heal From Memory paints a vivid picture of how our culture carries a history of traumatic violence--child sexual abuse, the ownership and enforcement of women's sexuality under slavery, the transmission of violence through generations, and the destruction of non-white cultures and their histories through colonization. According to Cassie Premo Steele, the poetry of Sexton, Lorde, and Anzaldúa allows us to witness and to heal from such disparate traumatic events.

This volume, with contributions in the form of narrations, or of work sheets, by leading British and American translators, shows what happens: how problems present themselves and how they are resolved. Ezra Pound regarded translation as a superior type of literary criticism, representing a fusion of creative and critical. In this collection, translators make explicit not only what is implicit in their translations, but also critical insights that inevitably and agonizingly, cannot be accommodated in them. The translator's complex role, or predicament, as mediator between cultures is exemplified here.

Philip Larkin is recognised as one of the most important writers to have emerged in Britain since the Second World War. First published in 1982, Andrew Motiona (TM)s study begins with an account of Larkina (TM)s life and literary background and discusses his literary relationship with Hardy and Yeats and his association with the Movement. He analyses Larkina (TM)s two novels and assesses his three mature collections. Throughout the book much reference is made to uncollected reviews and articles and occasionally to unpublished manuscripts. Rather than developing the familiar line on Larkin as an empirical and melancholy writer, Andrew Motion explores the Symbolist and transcendent element in his work, and emphasises its range and variety.

Throughout their marriage, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes engaged in a complex and continually evolving poetic dialogue about writing, love, and grief. Although scholars have commented extensively on the biographical details of Plath's and Hughes's marriage, few have undertaken a systematic intertextual analysis of the poets' work. The Grief of Influence reappraises this extraordinary literary partnership, and shows that the aesthetic and ideological similarities that provided a foundation for Plath's and Hughes's creative marriage - such as their mutual fascination with D. H. Lawrence and motifs of violence and war - intensified their artistic rivalry. Through close readings of both poets' work and analysis of new archival sources, Clark reveals for the first time how extensively Plath borrowed from Hughes and Hughes borrowed from Plath. She also explores the transatlantic dynamics of Plath's and Hughes's 'colonial' marriage within the context of the 1950s Anglo-American poetry scene and demonstrates how each poet's misreadings of the other contributed to the damaging stereotypes that now dominate the Plath-Hughes mythology. Following Plath and Hughes through alternating periods of collaboration and competition, The Grief of Influence shows how each poet forged a voice both through and against the other's, and offers a new assessment of the twentieth century's most important poetic partnership.

The essays on Dante collected in this volume interpret his Commedia as the attempt of a renewal of the Christian work of salvation by means of literature. In the view of his author, the sacro poema responds to a historical moment of extreme danger, in which nothing less than the redemption of mankind is at stake. The degradation of the medieval Roman Empire and the rise of an early capitalism in his birth town Florence, entailing a pernicious moral depravation for Dante, are to him nothing else but a variety of symptoms of the backfall of the world into its state prior to its salvation by the incarnation of Christ. Dante presents his journey into the other world as an endeavor to escape these risks. Mobilizing the traditional procedures of literary discourse for this purpose, he aims at writing a text that overcomes the deficiencies of the traditional Book of Revelation that, on its own terms, no longer seems capable of fulfilling his traditional tasks. The immense revaluation of poetry implied in Dante's Commedia, thus, contemporarily involves the claim of a substantial weakness of the institutional religious discourse.

D.H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet addresses a particular body of language and thought within Lawrence's oeuvre where the metaphorical, the poetic and the philosophical are intricately enmeshed. Lawrence emerges as a writer who pulls metaphor away from its merely rhetorical moorings: his distinctive style is the hallmark of one who thinks not analytically but poetically, about the birth of the self, the body unconscious, complex kinds of otherness and about metaphor itself as a mode of understanding.

This work explores an aspect of Yeats's writing largely ignored until now: namely, his wide-ranging absorption in S.T. Coleridge. Gibson explores the consistent and densely woven allusions to Coleridge in Yeats's prose and poetry, often in conjunction with other Romantic figures, arguing that the earlier poet provided him with both a model of philosopher - 'the sage' - and an interpretation of metaphysical ideas which were to have a resounding effect on his later poetry, and upon his rewriting of A Vision.

This study explores how poets who espoused republican political ideals sought to embody and advance those principles in their verse. By examining a range of canonical and non-canonical authors-including Blake, Shelley, Cooper, Linton, Landor, Meredith, Thomson and Swinburne, Kuduk Weiner connects the formal strategies of republican poems to the political theory and expressive cultures of republican radicalism. Her new study traces a strain of powerful, complex political poetry that casts new light on the political and literary history of nineteenth-century England.

'n Seleksie van poesie uit Suid-Afrika en Europa wat aan die Anglo-Boereoorlog gewy is. Die gedigte is so gerangskik dat hulle rofweg die verloop van die oorlog volg, vanaf die begin in 1899 tot aan die einde van die stryd in Mei 1902. Nie net bekende digters soos Leipoldt, Totius of Celliers, Verwey of Boutens het hulle oor die oorlog uitgelaat nie, maar ook ’n groot aantal geleentheidsdigters. Ondanks die subtitel van hierdie bloemlesing is drie Engelse gedigte (duidelik deur Boere geskryf) ook opgeneem.

The Word Rhythm Dictionary: A Resource for Writers, Rappers, Poets, and Lyricists is a new kind of dictionary-one that reflects the use of "rhythm rhymes" by rappers, poets, and songwriters of today. This is an eminently practical reference work for all wordsmiths looking to add musicality to their writing. Users of this dictionary can alphabetically look up words in the General Index to find collections of words that have the same rhythm as the original word and are readily useable in ways that are familiar to us in everything from vers libre poetry to the lyrics and music of Bob Dylan and hip hop groups. Professional writers and students have long used traditional rhyming dictionaries for inspiration by perusing lists of rhyming words; they may ask themselves, "I need a word that rhymes with blue," and are led to shoe, flu, or you. These rhyming words evoke through juxtaposition new images, thoughts, and actions that inspire creative directions and pleasing twists as verses and stanzas unfold. For the first time ever, this dictionary now allows writers and poets to ask the same question, but of word rhythm- "I need a word with the same rhythm as butterfly. . . . " Today's lyricists and poets know that there is so much more to the flow of their creations than just matching vowels. The Word Rhythm Dictionary organizes words by additional properties: phonetic similarity (alliteration and literary consonance), the number of syllables in words, and syllable stress patterns. Never has it been easier to locate words that feature similar sounds, matching meters, and rhythmic grooves, from traditional rhymes like "clashing" and "splashing," to near rhymes like "rollover" and "bulldozer," "unrefuted undisputed" to pure metrical matches, like "biology" and "photography." Additional appendixes allow readers to search according to poetic metrical feet and musical rhythm through a visual index of notated rhythms, allowing musicians and lyricists to track down words that match preexisting motives and melodies. This book could become the new fun addiction (or... addiction affliction...constriction conviction...conniption prescription...subscription conscription) for writers, musicians, lyricists, rappers, poets, and wordsmiths alike. Oh, and it's a lot of fun just to browse!

'Drawn on by his eagerness for the open sky, he left his guide and soared upwards...' Ovid tells the tales of Theseus and the Minotaur, Daedalus and Icarus, the Calydonian Boar-Hunt, and many other famous myths. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Ovid (c.43 BCE-17 CE). Ovid's other works available in Penguin Classics are The Erotic Poems, Fasti, Heroides and Metamorphoses.

"Diasporic Avant-Gardes" draws into dialogue twodiffering traditions ofpoetic practice: the diasporic and the avant-garde. This interdisciplinary collectionexamines the unacknowledged affinities (and crucial differences) between avant-garde and diasporic formal strategies and social formations. The essays foreground the creation of experimental forms and investigate the specific contexts of cultural displacement andlanguage use that inform their poetics.

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF LITERARY TRANSLATION IN ENGLISH
General Editors: Peter France and Stuart Gillespie
This groundbreaking five-volume history runs from the Middle Ages to the year 2000. It is a critical history, treating translations wherever appropriate as literary works in their own right, and reveals the vital part played by translators and translation in shaping the literary culture of the English-speaking world, both for writers and readers. It thus offers new and often challenging perspectives on the history of literature in English. As well as examining the translations and their wider impact, it explores the processes by which they came into being and were disseminated, and provides extensive bibliographical and biographical reference material.
Volume 1 of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English originates with what medievalists have long known, that virtually everything written in the Middle Ages in English can be regarded, one way or another, as a translation, and that medieval understandings of what constitutes literature were significantly more generous than many modern ones. It uses modern as well as medieval understandings of translation to inform its discussions (the two understandings have a great deal in common), and it aims to situate medieval translation in English as fully as possible in its various cultural contexts: this includes, in particular, the complicated inter-relations of translation throughout the period into Latin, and (for the Middle English period) of translation in French. Since it also understands the Middle Ages of its title as including the first half of the sixteenth century, it studies what has survived of nearly athousand years of translation activity in England.