Series Information:
Routledge Literary Sourcebooks

A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies provides an authoritative guide to debate on Elizabethan England's poet laureate. Its twelve chapters cover key topics (such as politics and gender) and provide reception histories for all of the primary texts. Some of today's most prominent Spenser scholars offer lively accounts of debates on the poet, from the Renaissance to the present day. Essential for those producing new research on Spenser, the Companion also provides an ideal introduction to the non-specialist.

Responses from the nineteenth century onwards to the medieval French poet. Medieval Paris' paradigmatic poet, Francois Villon, has long captured the imaginations of creative writers. Attracted by his beguilingly pseudo-autobiographical literary persona and a body of work that moves seamlessly between bawdy humour, bitterness, devotion, and regret, Villon's heirs have been many and varied. A veritable "poet's poet", his oeuvre has appealed to fellow versifiers in particular, providing a rich source for translation and imitation. This book explores creative responses to Villon by British and North American poets, focusing on translations and imitations of his work by Algernon Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, and Robert Lowell. They are presented as exemplary of the greater trend of rendering Villon into English, transporting the reader from the first verse translations of his work in the nineteenth century, to post-modern adaptations and parodies ofVillon in the twentieth. By concentrating on the manner in which individual poets have reacted to Villon, and to one another, the study unravels multiple layers of poetic relations. It argues that the relationships that exist between the translated or imitated texts are collaborative as much as they are competitive, establishing a canon of Villon in English poetry whose allusions are not only to the French source, but to the parallel corpus of English translations and imitations. CLAIRE PASCOLINI-CAMPBELL holds degrees in medieval and comparative literatures from the University of St Andrews and University College London.

Deeply involved with Irish culture and history, W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the greatest poets writing in the last two centuries. This Routledge Literary Sourcebook provides essential help for readers who wish to learn more about his powerful, haunting poems.
Considering Yeats's early, dreamily evocative poems as well as his passionate, tension-ridden later work, Michael O'Neill offers a refreshingly clear discussion of:
*contexts - through an invaluable, accessible overview, a detailed chronology and contemporary documents revealing Yeats's understanding of his vocation as a poet;
*interpretations - through helpfully introduced extracts from criticism of Yeats's work, ranging from early responses through to modern critical texts;
*key poems - in a section where insightful commentary accompanies the full annotated text of many of Yeats's major poems;
*further reading - to guide those interested in additional study.
The Sourcebook is ideal for those new to Yeats's poetry or those who wish to look deeper into its workings, its reception and the contexts from which it emerged.

Poet Thomas Carper and scholar Derek Attridge join forces in Meter and Meaning to present an illuminating and user-friendly way to explore the rhythms of poetry in English. They begin by showing the value of performing any poem aloud, so that we can sense its unique use of rhythm. From this starting point they suggest an entirely fresh, jargon-free approach to reading poetry. Illustrating their "beat/offbeat" method with a series of exercises, they help readers to appreciate the use of rhythm in poems of all periods and to understand the vital relationship between meter and meaning.
Beginning with the very basics, Meter and Meaning enables a smooth progression to an advanced knowledge of poetic rhythms. It is the essential guide to meter for anyone who wants to study, write, better appreciate, or simply enjoy poetry. Thomas Carper and Derek Attridge make studying meter a pleasure and reading poetry a revelation.

The foremost critical edition of the Greek lyric poets: Alcman, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides and Corinna, and other minor poets, and songs and fragments.

This study offers new approaches for considering the unique narrative possibilities of fairies in medieval romance, from Geoffrey of Monmouth's "Historia Regum Britannie" to Thomas Malory's "Morte d'Arthur." James Wade provides a counter-reading to theories of the Celtic origins of medieval fairies and suggests ways in which these unusual figures can help us think about the internal logics of medieval romance.

Why are there so few 'happily ever afters' in the Romantic-period verse romance? Why do so many poets utilise the romance and its parts to such devastating effect? Why is gender so often the first victim? The Romantic Paradox investigates the prevalence of death in the poetic romances of the Della Cruscans, Coleridge, Keats, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and Byron, and posits that understanding the romance and its violent tendencies is vital to understanding Romanticism itself.

This study analyses the major poems of the World War I and brings into focus some of the more neglected voices of that conflict. It draws attention also to women poets of the period.

This index compensates for the loss of bibliographic control that occurred when the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature decided to discontinue the indexing of poetry and supplements other poetry indexes which did not cover or covered incompletely periodical poetry. The volume contains title, first-line, author, and subject indexes to poems published in forty-four popular and professional periodicals. The title entry gives complete bibliographic information about each poem and entries in the other indexes are cross-referenced by number to it.

The appearance in 1609 of Shakespeare's Sonnets is cloaked in mystery and controversy, while the poems themselves are masterpieces of silence and deception. The intervening four centuries have done little to diminish either their mystique or their appeal, and recent years have witnessed an upsurge in interest in these brilliant and contentious lyrics. John Blades' penetrating study of the Sonnets is a highly lucid introduction to Shakespeare's subjects and poetic craft, involving detailed insights on the major themes, together with a comprehensive exploration of the Rival Poet and Dark Mistress sequences. Shakespeare: The Sonnets: - draws on an extensive range of sonnets, offering a line-by-line analysis that engages with the poems as masterworks in their own right, as well as registering their relationship with Shakespeare's dramas - locates the Sonnets in their Elizabethan and humanist framework, with a survey of the history of the sonnet form and rhetorical conventions within the context of the early modern period - concludes with a brief assessment of critical attitudes towards the Sonnets over the four centuries since their publication and an indepth examination of four important critics. Providing students with the critical and analytical skills with which to approach the Sonnets, and featuring a helpful glossary and suggestions for further study, this fascinating book is an indispensable guide.

"Through an examination of his later personal notebooks, this study explores the reciprocal effects that Samuel Taylor Coleridge's scientific explorations, philosophical convictions, theological beliefs, and states of health exerted upon his perceptions of human Body/Soul relations, both in life and after death"--Provided by publisher.

Two of our foremost poets provide here a lucid, straightforward primer that "looks squarely at some of the headaches and mysteries of poetic form": a book for readers who have always felt that an understanding of form (sonnet, ballad, villanelle, sestina, among others) would enhance their appreciation of poetry. Tracing "the exuberant history of forms," they devote one chapter to each form, offering explanation, close reading, and a rich selection of examplars that amply demonstrate the power and possibility of that form.

This is the first complete edition of A. E. Housman's poetry, unprecedented in the extent to which it reveals the shaping processes of his poetic thought. The text of the poems published after his death has been corrected from the manuscripts, with all variant readings recorded, and a substantial body of light verse and juvenilia is printed or collected for the first time. The extensive commentary traces the remarkable range of Housman's echoes and allusions - Biblical, Classical, and contemporary - which have never before been explored in such detail, as well as providing information on persons, places, and historical context, the dating of poems, and Housman's linguistic usage.

Take Note for Exam Success! York Notes offer an exciting approach to English literature. This market leading series fully reflects student needs. They are packed with summaries, commentaries, exam advice, margin and textual features to offer a wider context to the text and encourage a critical analysis. York Notes, The Ultimate Literature Guides.

Encompassing both the art song and Lieder traditions, this book includes comprehensive lists of the compositions of 125 major Western composers, the identities of the poets who wrote the lyrics, titles used by respective composers with cross-references from variant titles used by other composers, cross-references from the first lines, the publishers of the individual songs, the location of individual songs within the collected works of individual composers and the date of composition.
With this resource, a reader can find the songs written by a composer, who published a specific song, and which composers might have set a particular poem to music. Bradley's guide offers a user-friendly, contemporary index of information for which scholars previously had to search extensively.

The "International Who's Who in Poetry 2003" covers current and up-and-coming poets, as well as influential poets through history. Over 4,000 entries profile career histories and publication details, including full biographical information and details of poetic forms. A summary of poetic forms and rhyme schemes is also provided.
This reference lists Poets Laureate of the United Kingdom and of the United States of America, and Oxford University professors of poetry. It also details poets who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize, the Kings/Queens Gold Medal and other poetry prizes. This edition includes a new complete historical listing of over 8,000 important and influential authors and poets of the last 2000 years.

This volume is part of a collection of facsimile reprints integrating a wide range of Dante scholarship in eight thematic volumes. Illuminating the cosmos of Dante and providing the knowledge of a full range of fundamental ideas, issues, events and beliefs that characterized the world view of Dante's age. Dante's work has produced a prodigious body of secondary literature edited here for their exceptional quality and importance.

Take Note for Exam Success! York Notes offer an exciting approach to English literature. This market leading series fully reflects student needs. They are packed with summaries, commentaries, exam advice, margin and textual features to offer a wider context to the text and encourage a critical analysis. York Notes, The Ultimate Literature Guides.

T. S. Eliot is one of the most celebrated twentieth-century poets and one whose work is practically synonymous with perplexity. Eliot is perceived as extremely challenging due to the multi-lingual references and fragmentation we find in his poetry and his recurring literary allusions to writers including Dante, Shakespeare, Marvell, Baudelaire and Conrad. There is an additional difficulty for today's readers that Eliot probably didn't envisage: the widespread unfamiliarity with the Christian belief and culture that his work becomes increasingly steeped in. Steve Ellis introduces Eliot's work by using his extensive prose writings to illuminate the poetry. As a major critic, as well as poet, Eliot was highly conscious of the challenges his poetry set, of its relation and difference to the work of previous poets, and of the ways in which the activity of reading was problematised by his work, so by taking his prose as a starting point helps to clarify his poetic writing. The guide also offers an overview of key critical debates concerning Eliot's work.

Contents:
THE EARLY YEARS

Barker, Arthur. 'Milton's Schoolmasters.' Modern Language Review 32 (1937).

Miller, Leo. 'Milton's Clash with Chappell: A Suggested Reconstruction.' Milton Quarterly 14 (1980).

Hale, John K. 'Milton Plays the Fool: The Christ's College Salting 1628.' Classical and Modern Literature 20 (2000).

Rumrich, John. 'The Erotic Milton.' Texas Studies in Language and Literature 41 (1999).

Hill, John Spencer. 'Poet-Priest: Vocational Tension in Milton's Early Development.' Milton Studies 8 (1975).

Hanford, James Holly. 'Milton in Italy.' Annuale Mediaevale 5 (1964).

Friedman, Donald. 'Galileo and the Art of Seeing.' In Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradiction, edited by Mario A. Di Cesare (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991).

THE MATURE YEARS

Miller, Leo. 'John Milton's 'Lost' Sonnet to Mary Powell.' Milton Quarterly 25 (1990).

Sirluck, Ernest. 'Milton's Idle Right Hand.' Journal of English and German Philology 60 (1961).

Corns, Thomas. 'Milton's Quest for Respectability.' Modern Language Research 77 (1982).

Woolrych, Austin. 'Milton and Cromwell: 'A Short but Scandalous Night of Interruption'.' In Achievements of the Left Hand, edited by Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974).

Hughes, Merritt Y. 'Milton as a Revolutionary.' English Literary History 10 (1943).

Hunter, William B. 'Some Speculations on the Nature of Milton's Blindness.' Journal of the History of Medicine 17 (1962).

Baruch, Franklin R. 'Milton's Blindness: The Conscious and Unconscious Patterns of Autobiography.' English Literary History 42 (1975).

Davies, Godfrey. 'Milton in 1660.' Huntington Library Quarterly 18 (1955).

Kermode, Frank. 'Milton in Old Age.' Southern Review 11 (1975).

MILTON'S LITERARY AFTERLIFE

Frank, Marcia. 'Staging Criticism, Staging Milton: John Dryden's The State of Innocence.' The Eighteenth Century 34 (1993).

Bostich, June. 'Miltonic Influence in 'The Rape of the Lock'.' Enlightenment Essays 4 (1973).

Wittreich, Joseph A. 'The Illustrious Dead: Milton's Legacy and Romantic Prophecy.' Milton and the Romantics 4 (1980).

Grundy, Joan. 'Hardy and Milton.' Thomas Hardy Annual 3 (1985).

Jenkins, Hugh. 'Jefferson (Re)Reading Milton.' Milton Quarterly 32 (1998).

Herron, Carolivia. 'Milton and Afro-American Literature.' In Re-Membering Milton, edited by Mary Nyquist and Margaret Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987).

Drawing on the extraordinary wealth of scholarly and critical material on John Milton's life, works and influence, this collection of reprinted articles brings together the most illuminating scholarship that has been written about Milton in the last hundred years.
Volume five addresses some of the crucial issues in Milton's last two poems, published together in 1671.
Each volume contains articles exemplifying a wide range of critical approaches and scholarly methods offering the reader not only a broad introduction to one of England's greatest poets but also a vade mecum to the incredible diversity of literary critical activity that has characterized the field of Milton studies over the past century.

The lyric poems of Horace and Housman are two enigmatic bodies of work that have much in common, and a close reading of each poet's writings can illuminate the other's to a much greater extent than has been generally appreciated. This is the first book to provide a detailed, critical comparison between these two poets, and also the first to make use of Housman's unpublished lectures on Horace. Concentrating on the themes of sexuality, pessimism, religion, politics, integrity, form and content, Richard Gaskin offers an insightful examination of Housman's scholarly treatment of Horace and his general approach to literary criticism.

Yeats Annual No. 11 has four broad themes: W.B. Yeats's written and oral poetic technique; his philosophical interests in Eastern thought and A Vision; his manuscripts: and Jack B. Yeats's work, including his illustrations for his brother's writing. The contributions include: Michael Sidnell on Yeats's 'Written Speech'; Helen Vendler on Yeats and Ottava Rima; Steve Ellis on Chaucer, Yeats and the Living Voice; P.S. Sri on Yeats and Mohini Chatterjee; Matthew Gibson and Colin McDowell on A Vision and the automatic script; Wayne Chapman on the 'Countess Cathleen Row' of 1899 and revisions to the play; Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey on The Flame of the Spirit; Hilary Pyle on Jack B. Yeats's Illustrations for his Brother; John Purser's edited transcript of Jack Yeats and Thomas MacGreevy in conversation. There are shorter notes by Morton D. Paley, A.Norman Jeffares, Lis Pihl and others. Fourteen new books are reviewed and the nine plates include hitherto unpublished images.