Statutes of Liberty (1993) was the first book on The New York School of Poets, and offers the definitive critical account of its key figures: John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler. This second edition contains up-to-date material on the group and its growing influence on postmodern poetics. A new postscript focuses on the work of Ashbery, currently the most esteemed American poet since Wallace Stevens, and his profile output in the 1990s, including his two hundred page epic poem Flow Chart.

Once celebrated as "the English Sappho," Mary Robinson was a major figure in British Romanticism. This volume offers a comprehensive study of Robinson's achievement as a poet, professional writer, formative influence on the Romantic movement, and a participant in the literary, political, and social scene of the late 1700s.

Salvaging Spenser is a major new work of literary revision which places Edmund Spenser's corpus, from The Shepheardes Calender to A View of the Present State of Ireland, within an elaborate cultural and political context. The author refuses to engage in the sterile opposition between apology and attack that has marred studies of Spenser and Ireland, seeking neither to savage nor to save, but rather, in a project of critical recovery, to salvage Spenser from the wreckage of Irish history.

A poet of the seventeenth century, Milton with his future gaze may prove to be (singularly among the triumvirate of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton) the poet "for" the new millennium--the poet "for" the twenty-first century. Milton will be so to the extent that through him we see the upheavals in the humanities as deriving not from a revision of the canon but rather, as Bill Readings insists in "The University in Ruins, " from "a crisis in the "function" of the canon" and, then, to the extent that Milton shocks us into the recognition that poets sometimes deliver messages at odds with those with which they are credited.

This book explores key texts - Howards End , The Rainbow , and the poetry of Owen, Sassoon and Edward Thomas - to show the mingled continuation and rejection of convention as their characteristic achievement, exploring features often seen as failures. It also discusses the writing's increasing concern with the inadequacies of language, seeing it within the frame of contemporary society and deconstructive theory, and attempting to locate them in relation to high Modernism.

The British Romantic poets were among the first to realize the centrality of the "Divine Comedy" for the evolution of the European epic. This study explores the significance of Dante for Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and William Blake. What was their idea of Dante? Why did they feel the need to approach his Christian epic on the afterlife? This study aims to answer these questions by focusing on the three poets' preoccupation with form and language.

One of America's most celebrated poets, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her lifetime. When a slim volume of her poems emerged on the American scene in 1890, her work created shockwaves that have not subsided yet. Famously precise and sparse, Emily Dickinson's poetry is often described as philosophical, both because her poetry grapples with philosophical topics like death, spirituality, and the darkening operations of the mind, and because she approaches those topics in a characteristically philosophical manner: analyzing and extrapolating from close observation, exploring alternatives, and connecting thoughts into cumulative demonstrations. But unlike Lucretius or Pope, she cannot be accused of producing versified treatises. Many of her poems are unsettling in their lack of conclusion; their disparate insights often stand in conflict; and her logic turns crucially on imagery, juxtaposition, assonance, slant rhyme, and punctuation. The six chapters of this volume collectively argue that Dickinson is an epistemically ambitious poet, who explores fundamental questions by advancing arguments that are designed to convince. Dickinson exemplifies abstract ideas in tangible form and habituates readers into productive trains of thought-she doesn't just make philosophical claims, but demonstrates how poetry can make a distinct contribution to philosophy. All essays in this volume, drawn from both philosophers and literary theorists, serve as a counterpoint to recent critical work, which has emphasized Dickinson's anguished uncertainty, her nonconventional style, and the unsettled status of her manuscripts. On the view that emerges here, knowing is like cleaning, mending, and lacemakingL a form of hard, ongoing work, but one for which poetry is a powerful, perhaps indispensable, tool.

The first complete edition of the works of Robert Browning with variant readings and annotations contains: 1. The entire contents of the first editions of Browning's work; 2. All prefaces and dedications which Browning wrote for his own works and for those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and others; 3. The two prose essays: The Essay on Chatterton and The Essay on Shelley; 4. The front matter and tables of contents of each of the collected editions (1849, 1863, 1865, 1868, 1888-1889) which Browning himself saw through the press; 5 Poems by Browning published during his lifetime but not collected by him; 9. Poems not published during Browning's lifetime which have come to light since his death; 7. John Forster's Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford to which Browning contributed significantly, though to what precise extent has not been determined. The edition provides a full apparatus, including variant readings and annotations.

In this volume, thirteen essays examine the full breadth and variety of Coleridge's afterlives. Topics include philosophy, gender, imagination, American literature, South Asian literature, aesthetics, narrative, and poetry. It offers new research to the scholar, maps complex territory, and spans traditional period barriers in literary studies.

Iseult Gonne, daughter of Maud Gonne and the French politician and journalist Lucien Millevoye, attracted many admirers - among them distinguished authors such as W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Arthur Symms, Lennox Robinson, Francis Stuart and Liam O'Flaherty. Yeats proposed marriage to her, Ezra Pound had a secret, passionate love affair with her and she married Francis Stuart. This book contains her hitherto unpublished letters to Yeats and Pound, edited and annotated by Anna MacBride White (Maud Gonne's granddaughter), Christina Bridgwater (Iseult's granddaughter) and A. Norman Jeffares, the distinguished Yeats scholar.

Robert Browning both denied and affirmed the value of biography for an understanding of literature. This book narrates the development of his controversial creative life through responses to his work by five key 19th-century figures: John Stuart Mill, William Charles Macready, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold. It also relates Browning's sense of literary vocation to Victorian publishing. Browning emerges as a writer vividly engaged with contemporary assumptions, yet deeply aware of the unaccountability of writing.

This study focuses on the character, literary precursors and effects of the language in Virgil's Eclogues. It is divided into four major sections: word formation, linguistic models, style level, personal names. Each section examines the influence of earlier poets (Theocritus, Callimachus, Ennius, Lucretius, Catullus et al.), the reception by later poets of the Augustan Age (Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid) and in particular the relationship of the Eclogues to Vergil's later work (Georgica, Aeneis).

Contemporary Women's Poetry is a unique resource for students, teachers, and anyone interest in contemporary poetry. It offers the opportunity for readers to engage with the work of important figures and issues in contemporary women's poetry from two perspectives: that of poets themselves, and that of literary criticism. The poets discuss their writing practice and the reasons for their poetic strategies, while the literary critics many of whom are also poets themselves contextualise, analyse and situate the work of a wide range of poetry of the most significant women poets of our time in Britain and North America.

This set comprises of 42 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes.

In this book, Tim Fulford examines the male Romantics' versions of poetic authority in the context of their involvement in the political debates of Regency Britain. He argues that their response to Burke's gendered discourse about power effected radical changes in the definitions of masculinity and femininity. Discussing Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Radcliffe, Malthus and Mary Robinson, he offers new perspectives on current critical debates concerning the Gothic, the sublime, and gender.

The first collection focused on the writing of provocative author and performance artist Sapphire, including her groundbreaking novel PUSH that has since become the Academy-award-winning film Precious.

Mina Loy-poet, artist, exile, and luminary-was a prominent and admired figure in the art and literary circles of Paris, Florence, and New York in the early years of the twentieth century. But over time, she gradually receded from public consciousness and her poetry went out of print. As part of the movement to introduce the work of this cryptic poet to modern audiences, Poetic Salvage: Reading Mina Loy provides new and detailed explications of Loy's most redolent poems. This book helps readers gain a better understanding of the body of Loy's work as a whole by offering compelling close readings that uncover the source materials that inspired Loy's poetry, including modern artwork, Baedeker travel guides, and even long-forgotten cultural venues. Helpfully keyed to the contents of Loy's Lost Lunar Baedeker, edited by Roger Conover, this book is an essential aid for new readers and scholars alike. Mina Loy forged a legacy worthy of serious consideration-through a practice best understood as salvage work, of reclaiming what has been so long obscured. Poetic Salvage: Reading Mina Loy dives deep to bring hidden treasures to the surface.

This collection of essays addresses poetic and critical responses to the various crises encountered by contemporary writers and our society. The essays included discuss a range of issues from the holocaust, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and their aftermath and the war on terror to the ecological crisis, poetry's relationship to place and questions of cultural and national identity. What are the means available to poetry to address the various crises it faces, and how can both poets and critics meet the challenges posed by society and the literary community? How can poetry justify its own role as a meaningful form of cultural and artistic practice? The volume focuses on poetry from Britain, Ireland and the US, and many of the poets discussed in this volume are among the most acclaimed contemporary writers, including for example Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Louise Gluck and Alice Oswald.

Carter explores early modern culture's reception of Ovid through the manipulation of Ovidian myth by Shakespeare, Middleton, Heywood, Marlowe and Marston. With a focus on sexual violence, homosexuality, incest and idolatry, Carter analyses how depictions of mythology represent radical ideas concerning gender and sexuality.

The insights here are of such depth, and contain such beauty in them, that time and again the reader must pause for breath. At last Rilke has met a critic whose insight, courage, and humanity are worthy of his life and work."
--Leslie Epstein Director, Graduate Creative Writing Program, Boston University

" A] well-reasoned, fairly fascinating, and illuminating study which soundly and convincingly applies Freudian and particularly post-Freudian insights into the self, to Rilke's life and work, in a way which enlightens us considerably as to the relationship between life and work in original ways. Kleinbard takes off where Hugo Simenauer's monumental psycho- biography of Rilke (1953) left off. . . . He succeeds in giving us a psychic portrait of the poet which is more illuminating and which . . . does greater justice to its subject than any of his predecessors.. . . . Any reader with strong interest in Rilke would certainly welcome the availability of this study."
--Walter H. Sokel, Commonwealth Professor of German and English Literatures, University of Virginia.

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are just able to bear, and we wonder at it so because it calmly disdainsto destroy us."
--Rilke

Beginning with Rilke's 1910 novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, "The Beginning of Terror" examines the ways in which the poet mastered the illness that is so frightening and crippling in Malte and made the illness a resource for his art. Kleinbard goes on to explore Rilke's poetry, letters, and non-fiction prose, his childhood and marriage, and the relationship between illness and genius in the poet and his work, a subject to which Rilke returned time and again.

This psychoanalytic study also defines the complex connections between Malte's and Rilke's fantasies of mental and physical fragmentation, and the poet's response to Rodin's disintegrative and re-integrative sculpture during the writing of The Notebooks and New Poems. One point of departure is the poet's sense of the origins of his illness in his childhood and, particularly, in his mother's blind, narcissistic self- absorption and his father's emotional constriction and mental limitations. Kleinbard examines the poet's struggle to purge himself of his deeply felt identification with his mother, even as he fulfilled her hopes that he become a major poet. The book also contains chapters on Rilke's relationships with Lou Andreas Salom and Aguste Rodin, who served as parental surrogates for Rilke.

A psychological portrait of the early twentieth-century German poet, "The Beginning of Terror" explores Rilke's poetry, letters, non-fiction prose, his childhood and marriage. David Kleinbard focuses on the relationship between illness and genius in the poet and his work, a subject to which Rilke returned time and again.

This book fills a lacuna in the intellectual history of the seventeenth century by investigating the role that skepticism plays in the declining prestige of memory. It argues that Shakespeare and Donne revolutionize the art of memory, thanks to their skepticism, and thereby transform literary strategies like mimesis, exemplarity, and pastoral.

The correspondence of John Dryden is the definitive edition of the letters of the most important playwright and poet of the late seventeenth century. He defined an age and his newly transcribed disparate correspondence is placed in the context of contemporaneous and current debates about literature, politics and religion. It is also the most important account of the relationship between an author and his bookseller of the time. The illustrated correspondence contains a full biographical, textual introduction and calendar of letters. It is transcribed diplomatically and structured chronologically, with contextualising sections about particular correspondences. The readership will be undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students and academics with an interest in seventeenth century literature, politics, religion and culture. The editor won the MLA Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters. -- .

'The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day ...' Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' has been loved and admired throughout the centuries. First circulated to a select group of friends, it was rushed to official publication in 1751 in order to avoid pirated copies being sold without the young poet's permission. Praised by Samuel Johnson, reprinted over and over again in Gray's lifetime and recited by generations of school children, it is one of the most famous poems in the English language. This edition reproduces the exquisite wood engravings made by Agnes Miller Parker in 1938. Parker visited the churchyard at St Giles, Stoke Poges, where the poem is set, in order to make her sketches, and all thirty-two stanzas of the poem are accompanied by detailed full-page illustrations. Commemorating the 250th anniversary of the poet's death, this edition will not only bring new readers to the 'Elegy' but will also appeal to those already familiar with its riches.