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.

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.

The politics of Yeats, Eliot and Pound have long been a source of discomfort and difficulty for literary critics and cultural historians. In The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot and Pound, Michael North offers a subtle reading of these issues by linking aesthetic modernism with an attempt in all these writers to resolve basic contradictions in modern liberalism. The many contradictions of modernism, which is seen as inwardly personal yet impersonal, subjective and yet beholden to tradition, fragmented and yet whole, mark the reappearance in art of these political contradictions. Though Yeats, Eliot and Pound certainly attempted to resolve in art problems that could not be resolved in actuality, their very attempt resulted in a politicised aesthetic, one that confessed their inability to do so. Yet this aesthetic retained an element of critical power, precisely because it could not cover up the political contradictions that concerned it; the poetry remains a valid criticism of the status quo and even in its failure suggests the beginnings of an alternative.

This comprehensive volume contains all Sylvia Plath's mature poetry written from 1956 up to her death in 1963. The poems are drawn from the only collection Plath published while alive, The Colossus, as well as from posthumous collections Ariel, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees. The text is preceded by an introduction by Ted Hughes and followed by notes and comments on individual poems. There is also an appendix containing fifty poems from Sylvia Plath's juvenilia. This collection was awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. 'For me, the most important literary event of 1981 has been the publication, eighteen years after her death, of Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems, confirming her as one of the most powerful and lavishly gifted poets of our time.' A. Alvarez in the Observer

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.

Although modern English and Irish poetry arises from the different cultures, the poets themselves have shared, throughout this century, the same editors and publishers, competed for the same prizes and been judged, ostensibly, by the same standards. This book examines contexts for these exchanges over four decades, tracing the lineage of Yeats and Hardy from their meeting in 1912 through WWI, the 30s, the 60s, and the 90s, to see what influences and ideas are exchanged and how poetic value accrues.

Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America explores nineteenth-century poetry as it addresses and engages in the major concerns of American cultural life. Focusing on gender, biblical politics, Revolutionary discourses and racial, sectional, and religious identities, this book reveals how these issues contended and negotiated with each other in the shaping of a pluralist democratic polity. Nineteenth-century American poetry, far from being the self-reflective art object of twentieth-century aesthetic theory, offered a rhetorical arena in which civic, economic, and religious trends intersected with each other in mutual definition and investigation. With a deft hand, Shira Wolosky demonstrates the ways in which poetry was a core impulse in the formation of American identity and cultural definition.

Thomas Hardy in the Literary Lives series relates Hardy's life to his career as a writer, giving particular attention to his determination as a young man to make literature his career, his methodical preparation during the first thirty years of his life for that career, the writing of his fourteen published novels and the fame they brought him, and then, the culmination of his life as writer, his emergence in his remaining thirty years as one of the very greatest of English poets and the writer of The Dynasts.

A critical monograph which benefits from the textual rigour of Archie Burnett's landmark edition of 'The Complete Poems' (2012), 'Radical Larkin' celebrates Larkin's technical genius by offering seven in-depth analyses of the stylistic strategies he used to create eleven of his most famous poems.

This volume questions and qualifies commonly accepted assumptions about the early modern English sonnet: that it was a strictly codified form, most often organised in sequences, which only emerged at the very end of the sixteenth century and declined as fast as it had bloomed, and that minor poets merely participated in the sonnet fashion by replicating established conventions. Drawing from book history and relying on close reading and textual criticism, this collection offers a more nuanced account of the history of the sonnet. It discusses how sonnets were written, published and received in England as compared to mainland Europe, and explores the works of major (Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser) and minor (Barnes, Harvey) poets alike. Reflecting on current editorial practices, it also provides the first modern edition of an early seventeenth-century Elizabethan miscellany including sonnets presumably by Sidney and Spenser. -- .

Spenser's ethics offers a novel account of Edmund Spenser as a moral theorist, situating his ethics at the nexus of moral philosophy's profound transformation in the early modern era, and the English colonisation of Ireland in the turbulent 1580's and 90's. It revises a scholarly narrative describing Spenser's ethical thinking as derivative, nostalgic, or inconsistent with one that contends him to be one of early modern England's most original and incisive moral theorists, placing The Faerie Queene at the centre of the contested discipline of moral philosophy as it engaged the social, political, and intellectual upheavals driving classical virtue ethics' unravelling at the threshold of early modernity. -- .

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. -- .

Overviews the background, plot, themes, and language of Beowulf Perhaps the most important work written in Old English, Beowulf tells of a world very different from our own. While the history and culture behind the poem make it challenging for modern audiences, its story of war, violence, and heroism remains relevant to today's readers. Though largely neglected until the 20th century, Beowulf is now widely studied by school students and undergraduates. In addition, it continues to shape contemporary popular culture. This companion overviews the poem and its legacy. The first part of the book provides information of interest to a wide range of readers, while the second covers more specialized topics. Thus the initial chapters review the merits of different translations and offer a detailed plot summary, while later chapters discuss the poem's language and style, its treatment of religion, its relation to Anglo-Saxon culture, and its legacy in popular culture. One of the greatest Beowulf scholars was J.R.R. Tolkien, and the book gives special attention to his use of the poem in his own fiction. valuable guide to one of the most challenging yet enduring works of English literature.; Accessible to school students and general readers; Provides a detailed plot summary; Discusses the poem's background, style, and language; Discusses the poem's lasting influence on contemporary popular culture, including its influence on Tolkien

W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H. D., and David Jones, major poets of the early twentieth century, were fully involved in the historic conflict between religion and science. Jacob Korg's study illuminates the manner in which they attempted to overcome the division between the two cultures - by incorporating elements of religious ritual as well as scientific experiment in their poems. Known primarily as innovators who devised new methods of artistic expression, these poets also employed ritual, a form even more ancient than myth, side by side with their experimental ventures. Through close study of their major poems, Korg shows that the interplay between these apparently contradictory principles was a persistent theme of modern poetry that played an important part in the poetic revolution of the time.

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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.

First published in 1979, this is a very welcome reissue of Kathleen Raine's seminal study of William Blake - England's only prophet. He challenged with extraordinary vigour the premises which now underline much of Western civilization, hitting hard at the ideas of a naive materialist philosophy which, even in his own day, was already eating at the roots of English national life. In his insistence that ?mental things are alone real?, Blake was ahead of his time. Materialist views are now challenged from various quarters; the depth psychologies of Freud and Jung, the study of Far Easter religion and philosophy, the reappraisal of myth and folk lore, the wealth of psychical research have all prepared the way for an understanding of Blake's thought. We are ready to acknowledge that in attacking ?the sickness of Albion? Blake penetrated to the inner worlds of man and explored them in a way that is quite unique.

Dr Raine, who has made a long study of Blake's sources, presents him as a lonely powerful genius who stands within the spiritual tradition of Sophia Perennis, ?the Everlasting Gospel?. From the standpoint of this great human Norm, our immediate past described by W.B. Yeats as ?the three provincial centuries?, is a tragic deviation; catastrophic, as Blake believed, in its spiritual and material consequences. Only now do we possess the necessary knowledge to understand William Blake and the ever-growing number of people who turn to him surely justifies his faith in the eternal truths he strove to communicate.

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.

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.

"True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, / As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance," wrote Alexander Pope. "The dance," in the case of Oliver's brief and luminous book, refers to the interwoven pleasures of sound and sense to be found in some of the most celebrated and beautiful poems in the English language, from Shakespeare to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Robert Frost. With a poet's ear and a poet's grace of expression, Oliver shows what makes a metrical poem work - and enables readers, as only she can, to "enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure that intensify both the poem's narrative and its ideas."