Amongst the troubadour poets, those writers of courtly love poetry that flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the south of France, Giraut de Borneil was one of the most important and influential. Dante thought very highly of him. Little serious attention has been paid to his work, however, largely due to the absence of a modern critical edition. Dr Sharman rectified this situation with this scrupulously-researched 1989 edition which covers Giraut's entire output. Translations into English and detailed commentaries on each poem are provided. In her introduction, Dr Sharman discusses what is known of Giraut's life and patrons. She places his work in the context of troubadour poetry while highlighting his particular originality: more than any other troubadour poet before or after, he involves the lady as an equal participant in love. His work integrates the moral and social convention of courtly love into a wider framework of Christian behaviour, and contains an extraordinarily wide range of styles, the apparently easy manner of which conceals deeper levels of meaning than have been elucidated hitherto.

Don Juan , Byron's best poem, is a sensational radical satire. It uses the legend of Don Juan to expose the male fantasies behind Romanticism and nineteenth-century public culture. Critics feared that the poem was a 'manual for vice' and would corrupt society. Should England's best selling author have been censored? This book looks at how Europe's most famous literary celebrity shows his dark side in Don Juan , a canonical long poem and a pop culture masterpiece.

William Blake and the Body re-evaluates Blake's central image: the human form. In Blake's designs, transparent-skinned bodies passionately contort; in his verse, metamorphic bodies burst from each other in gory, gender-bending births. The culmination is an ideal body uniting form and freedom. Connolly explores romantic-era contexts like anatomical art, embryology, miscarriage, and 20th century theorists like those of Kristeva, Douglas, and Girard to provide an innovative new analysis of Blake's transformations of body and identity.

The real test of Abram s historical explanations is of course whether or not they work whether, when we apply the criteria of correspondence and coherence (Just as in interpreting a poem), they make sense out of the particulars at hand and produce useful generalizations even in the face of competing historical interpretations. Abrams work continues to hold up. Jack Stillinger"

New Perspectives on Thomas Hardy is a lively and varied collection of new essays on Thomas Hardy, contributed by some of the world's leading Hardy scholars. The essays range widely over Hardy's work, thought, creative methods and life, and show a variety of critical approaches. The essays collected here will appeal equally to scholars, students and non-academic Hardy enthusiasts.

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.

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.

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 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

This literary study of the first-century BCE Roman poet, Catullus uses two sets of comparative models to offer a new understanding of his poems. The first consists of cultural anthropological accounts of male social interaction in the premodern Mediterranean, and the second, the postmodern poetics of such twentieth-century poets as Louis Zukofsky, which are characterized by simultaneous juxtaposition, a "collage" aesthetic, and self-allusive play. The book will be of interest to students of comparative literature and gender studies as well as to classicists.

Walt Whitman and His Caribbean Interlocutors: Jose Marti, C.L.R. James, and Pedro Mir explores the writings of Whitman (1819-1892) and of three Caribbean authors who engaged with them. These three interlocutors-the Cuban poet, essayist and revolutionary Jose Marti (1853-1895); the Trinidadian activist, historian and cultural critic C.L.R. James (1901-1989); and the Dominican poet Pedro Mir (1913-2000-all saw in the famous American poet and pacifist a key lens through which to understand North American capitalism and is imperial projections. Whitman and his Caribbean interlocutors are discussed against the backdrop of capitalist modernity's contradictions, as exemplified by the United States between the 1840s and the 1940s. Bernabe deftly uses Marx's exploration of the liberating and oppressive dimensions of capitalist expansion to frame his discussion of each individual author and of Marti's, James's, and Mir's responses to Whitman.

"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.

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.

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.

"Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa" brings together over two decades of interviews and profiles with one of America's most prolific and acclaimed contemporary poets. Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947) describes his work alternately as "word paintings" and as "music," and his affinity with the visual and aural arts is amply displayed in these conversations. The volume also addresses the diversity and magnitude of Komunyakaa's literary output. His collaborations with artists in a variety of genres, including music, dance, drama, opera, and painting have produced groundbreaking performance pieces. Throughout the collection, Komunyakaa's interest in finding and creating poetry across the artistic spectrum is made manifest.

For his collection "Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, 1977-1989," Komunyakaa became the first African American male to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Through his work he provides keen insight into life's mysteries from seemingly inconsequential and insignificant life forms ("Ode to the Maggot") to some of the most compelling historical and life-altering events of our time, such as the Vietnam War ("Facing It"). Influenced strongly by jazz, blues, and folklore, as well as the classical poetic tradition, his poetry comprises a riveting chronicle of the African American experience.

In recent years critics of Romantic poetry have divided into two groups that have little to say to one another. One group, as yet the most numerous, insists that to study a poem is to investigate the historical circumstances out of which it was produced; the other retorts that poetry offers pleasures fully available only to readers whose attention is focused on their language. This book attempts to reconcile the two groups by arguing that a poet's most effective political action is the forging of a new language and that the political import of a poem is a function of its style.

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.

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.

A world of dew And within every dewdrop A world of struggle The iconic three-line haiku form is increasingly popular today as people embrace its simplicity and grace--and its connections to the Japanese ethos of mindfulness and minimalism. Say more with fewer words. This practical guide by poet and teacher Bruce Ross shows you how to capture a fleeting moment, like painting a picture with words, and how to give voice to your innermost thoughts, feelings, and observations. You don't have to be a practiced poet or writer to write your own haiku, and this book shows you how. In this book, aspiring poets will find: Accessible, easy-to-replicate examples and writing prompts A foreword that looks at the state of haiku today as the form continues to expand worldwide An introduction to related Japanese haiku forms such as tanka, haiga, renga, haibun, and senryu A listing of international journals and online resources Do you want to tell a story? Give haibun a try. Maybe you want to express a fleeting feeling? A tanka is the perfect vehicle. Are you more visual than verbal? Then a haiga, or illustrated haiku, is the ideal match. Finally, a renga is perfect as a group project or to create with friends, passing a poem around, adding line after line, and seeing what your group effort amounts to. Ross walks readers through the history and form of haiku, before laying out what sets each Japanese poetic form apart. Then it's time to turn to your notebook and start drafting some verse of your own!