First published in 1969, this title examines the works of Jonathan Swift from both a literary and an historical perspective. W. A. Speck first presents Swift in his historical context, analysing in particular the interplay between his religious and political views. Light is thrown on the early pamphlets as well as on "A Tale of a Tub" and "Gulliver s Travels," alongside a fascinating chapter by Philip Roberts considering Swift s poetry. This illuminating title will be of value to any literature students with an interest in the writings of Swift and the historical context in which he worked."

The purpose of this series is to promote the study of writing in the English language through the introduction of the major figures writing in English throughout the ages. The books provide an analytical and historical framework for understanding their subjects. In this introduction to Wordworth's work, Andrew Keanie explores the poet's politics, his relationship with his sister Dorothy and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as well as his synthesis of poetry and philosophy, his startlingly modern strategy of image-building and quest for literary immortality. Keanie sifts through Wordworth's vast output to select those poems of enduring meaning, making clear his achievements.

Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry 1660-1780, originally published in 1981, considers poetry written between 1660 and 1780, a period which, although largely recovered from its nineteenth-century reputation, still attracts widely varying critical responses. Abandoning the old labels such as neoclassicism, romanticism and sensibility, the author focuses on descriptions of genres and their formal elements and traces the broader patterns of literary and historical change running through the period.

Eric Rothstein describes different poetic modes- panegyric, satire, pastoral and topographical poetry, the epistle, and the ode- to suggest their aesthetical possibilities as well as their process of change. He also considers style and the uses of the past, topics which have often caused particular problems for the students of the period. What becomes clear is the extraordinary originality, flexibility and power with which Restoration and eighteenth-century poets handles the stylistic assumptions and the body of poems they inherited and employed in their own works. "

A pioneering critic, educator, and poet, I. A. Richards (1893-1979) helped the English-speaking world decide not only what to read but how to read it. Acknowledged "father" of New Criticism, he produced the most systematic body of critical writing in the English language since Coleridge. His method of close reading dominated the English-speaking classroom for half a century. John Paul Russo draws on close personal acquaintance with Richards as well as on unpublished materials, correspondence, and interviews, to write the first biography (originally published in 1989) of one of last century's most influential and many-sided men of letters.

First published in 1988, this annotated selection of Wilfred Owen's poetry and prose provides a comprehensive one-volume text of his best work. As well as the war poems, it includes illuminating early pieces such as 'Impressionist' and 'Little Claus and Big Claus', which illustrate Owen's early command of satire and narrative. The prose includes Owen's well-known draft Preface and a wide range of his letters, showing the devotion he felt for his mother, his poetic development after meeting Siegfried Sassoon, and, above all, his war experiences. With a detailed introduction and helpful commentary, this timely reissue will be of particular value to A-Level and undergraduate students with an interest in the work of Wilfred Owen, his contemporaries, and the context of the First World War.

A surprisingly large number of English poets have either belonged to a secret society, or been strongly influenced by its tenets. One of the best known examples is Christopher Smart's membership of the Freemasons, and the resulting influence of Masonic doctrines on A Song to David. However, many other poets have belonged to, or been influenced by not only the Freemasons, but the Rosicrucians, Gormogons and Hell-Fire Clubs. First published in 1986, this study concentrates on five major examples: Smart, Burns, William Blake, William Butler Yeats and Rudyard Kipling, as well as a number of other poets. Marie Roberts questions why so many poets have been powerfully attracted to the secret societies, and considers the effectiveness of poetry as a medium for conveying secret emblems and ritual. She shows how some poets believed that poetry would prove a hidden symbolic language in which to reveal great truths. The beliefs of these poets are as diverse as their practice, and this book sheds fascinating light on several major writers.

It is impossible to appreciate poetry fully without some knowledge of the various aspects of poetic technique. First published in 1953, with a second edition in 1982, this title explains all the usual technical terms in an accessible manner. Marjorie Boulton shows that it is possible to approach a poem from a business-like perspective without losing enjoyment. This reissue will be of particular value to students as well as those with a general interest in the specifics of poetry.

A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A renowned Keats scholar illuminates the poet's extraordinary career, in a new edition featuring seventy-eight verse selections with commentary. John Keats's career as a published poet spanned scarcely more than four years, cut short by his death early in 1821 at age twenty-five. Yet in this time, he produced a remarkable-and remarkably wide-ranging-body of work that has secured his place as one of the most influential poets in the British literary tradition. Celebrated Keats scholar Susan J. Wolfson presents seventy-eight selections from his work, each accompanied by a commentary on its form, style, meanings, and relevant contexts. In this edition, readers will rediscover a virtuoso poet, by turns lively, experimental, self-ironizing, outrageous, and philosophical. Wolfson includes such well-known favorites as Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, La Belle Dame sans Merci, and The Eve of St. Agnes, as well as less familiar poems, several in letters to family and friends never meant for publication. Her selections redefine the breadth and depth of Keats's poetic imagination, from intellectual jests and satires to erotic bandying, passionate confessions, and reflections on mortality. The selections, presented in their order of composition, convey a chronicle of Keats's artistic and personal evolution. Wolfson's revealing commentaries unfold the lively complexities of his verbal arts and stylistic experiments, his earnest goals and nervous apprehensions, and the pressures of politics and literary criticism in his day. In critically attentive and conversational prose, Wolfson encourages us to experience Keats in the way that he himself imagined the language of poetry: as a living event, a cooperative experience shared between author and reader.

Traditionally, Wordsworth s greatness is founded on his identity as the poet of nature and solitude. The Wordsworthian imagination is seen as an essentially private faculty, its very existence premised on the absence of other people. In this title, first published in 1987, David Simpson challenges this established view of Wordsworth, arguing that it fails to recognize and explain the importance of the context of the public sphere and the social environment to the authentic experience of the imagination. Wordsworth s preoccupation with the metaphors of property and labour shows him to be acutely anxious about the value of his art in a world that he regarded as corrupted. Through close examination of a few important poems, both well-known and relatively unknown, Simpson shows that there is no unitary, public Wordsworth, nor is there a conflict or tension between the private and the public. The absence of any clear kind of authority in the voice that speaks the poems makes Wordsworth s poetry, in Simpson s phrase, a poetry of displacement . "

In this critical and historical interpretation of Petrarch's major Italian work, the collection of poems he called the Rerum vulgarium fagmenta, Peter Hainsworth presents Petrarch as a poet of outstanding sophistication and seriousness, occupied with issues which are still central to debates about poetry and language. In the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta Petrarch reformed the received Italian tradition, creating a new kind of lyric poetry. In particular, he found solutions to the intellectual, linguistic and imaginative problems which Dante's Divine Comedy posed for the succeeding generation of poets. Petrarch the Poet illumines the complexities of Petrarch's poetic vision, which is simultaneously a form of autobiographical narrative, a poetic encyclopaedia and a meditation on the nature of poetry. The book will appeal to Italian specialists, to those interested in European poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and also to readers interested generally in the nature and function of poetry.

Santilli addresses the problem of meaning as it is conveyed by poetic language. By drawing upon the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the text argues that poems convey meaning in much the same way that spontaneous unreadable gestures do.

Reissuing works originally published between 1958 and 1993, this five-volume set offers a selection of scholarship on the greatest classical poet, whose two monumental epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, remain foundational to the Western cultural tradition. Routledge Library Editions: Homer helps to situate this immense artistic achievement in its historical and cultural context, considering issues such as the relationship between the Homeric epics and the Mycenaean civilisation which preceded them, the importance of Homer for the flowering of Greek tragedy, and the reception of Homer during and after the Enlightenment.

Stanley Lombardo's deft abridgment of his 2005 translation of the Aeneid preserves the arc and weight of Virgil's epic by presenting major books in their entirety and abridged books in extended passages seamlessly fitted together with narrative bridges. W. R. Johnson's Introduction, a shortened version of his masterly Introduction to that translation, will be welcomed by both beginning and seasoned students of the Aeneid , and by students of Roman history, classical mythology, and Western civilization.

The life, work and history of Aphra Behn: seventeenth century dramatist, poet, novelist, political propagandist, bisexual writer, and spy. Praise for the first hardback edition: Fascinating scholarship. Todd conveys Behn's vivacious character and the mores of the time. the New York Times Ground-breakingit reads quickly and lightly. Even Todd s throwaway lines are steeped in learning and observation. Ruth Perry, MIT, Women s Review of Books A major biography; of interest to everyone who cares about women as writers. Times Higher Education Supplement Fascinating, a page-turner and a delight, an astonishingly thorough book. Emma Donoghue All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn...For it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. Virginia Woolf Aphra Behn, a spy in the Netherlands and the Americas, was the first professional woman writer. The most prolific dramatist of her age, innovative novelist, translator, lyrical and erotic poet, she expresses a frank sexuality addressing impotence, orgasm and bisexuality, whilst serving as political propagandist for the monarch. This revised biography of the extraordinary, ground-breaking writer, who is emblematic of the Restoration period, a time of masks and self-fashioning, is set in conflict-ridden England, Europe, and in the mismanaged slave colonies, following the Puritan republic in 1660. Janet Todd, novelist and internationally renowned scholar, was President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and a Professor at Rutgers, NJ. An expert on women s writing and feminism, she has published on many writers, including Jane Austen, the Shelley Circle, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Aphra Behn. "

Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice vigorously engages with the Why? and the How? of prose poetry, a form that is currently enjoying a surge in popularity. With contributions by both practitioners and academics, this volume seeks to explore how its distinctive properties guide both writer and reader, and to address why this form is so well suited to the early twenty-first century. With discussion of both classic and less well- known writers, the essays both illuminate prose poetry's distinctive features and explore how this "outsider" form can offer a unique way of viewing and describing the uncertainties and instabilities which shape our identities and our relationships with our surroundings in the early twenty-first century. Combining insights on the theory and practice of prose poetry, Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice offers a timely and valuable contribution to the development of the form, and its appreciation amongst practitioners and scholars alike. Largely approached from a practitioner perspective, this collection provides vivid snapshots of contemporary debates within the prose poetry field while actively contributing to the poetics and craft of the form.

First published in 1982, this book provides a descriptive and comparative study of some of the fundamental structural aspects of modernist poetic writing in English, French and German in the first decades of the twentieth century. The work concerns itself primarily with basic structural elements and techniques and the assumptions that underlie and determine the modernist mode of poetic writing. Particular attention is paid to the theories developed by authors and to the essential principles of construction that shape the structure of their poetry. Considering the work of a number of modernist poets, Theo Hermans argues that the various widely divergent forms and manifestations of modernistic poetry writing can only be properly understood as part of one general trend. "

The edition brings together the known writings in poetry and prose of Edward Rushton (1756--1814). Blinded by trachoma after an outbreak on the slaving ship in which he was a young officer, Rushton returned to Liverpool to scratch a living as a publican, newspaper editor, and finally bookseller and publisher. In his day Rushton was a well-known Liverpool poet and reformer, with an impressively wide range of causes (the Liverpool Blind School, the Liverpool Marine Society, and many radical political groups). Many of his songs, particularly the marine ballads, were very familiar in Britain and America. In the later Victorian period, as a particular version of romanticism began to dominate literary sensibilities, Rushton's overt politics fell from favour and he became rather obscure, at least by comparison with his like-minded (but much better off) friend William Roscoe. As the history of slavery abolition and other radical causes has come to be re-examined, the bicentenary of Rushton's death, falling in November 2014, has suggested an opportunity to take a new look at his remarkable career and impressive body of work. There has never been a critical edition of Rushton's poems. His own 1806 edition omits much, including what is his best-known work in modern times, the anti-slavery West-Indian Eclogues of 1787; the posthumous 1824 edition omits much from the 1806 collection while drawing in other work. The present edition works from the earliest datable sources, in newspapers, chapbooks, periodicals, and broadsides, providing a clean text with significant revisions and variants noted in the commentary. Unfamiliar words are glossed, and brief introductions and contextual commentaries, informed by the latest scholarship, are given for each piece of writing.

Latin was Scotland's third language in the early modern period, alongside Scots and Gaelic, and the reign of King James VI and I is considered to be a golden age of Scottish neo-Latin literature. Corona Borealis considers Latin texts by Scottish authors written between James's birth in 1566 and his removal to England in 1603, and highlights the role of Latin in Scottish cultural life. The production of Latin poetry by Scots grew exponentially in the decades immediately following the Protestant Reformation (1560), bolstered by a new focus on renaissance education in Scotland's schools and universities, and Scottish neo-Latinists were part of a European community of humanist scholars fascinated by the Classical past. Verses by George Buchanan, Patrick Adamson, Thomas Craig of Riccarton, Thomas Maitland, Hercules Rollock, Henry Anderson, and Andrew Melville - most of which have never appeared in translation before - are presented with facing English translations. Steven J. Reid and David McOmish provide clear, accessible editions of each text, along with scholarly introductions and detailed linguistic and historical notes.

Of interest to interdisciplinary historians as well as those in various other fields, this book presents the first publication of 14 poems ranging from 12 to 3,000 lines. The poems are printed in the chronological order of their composition, from Elizabethan to Augustan times, but nine of them are verse translations of works from earlier periods in the development of alchemy. Each has a textual and historical introduction and explanatory note by the Editor. Renaissance alchemy is acknowledged as an important element in the histories of early modern science and medicine. This book emphasises these poems' expression of and shaping influence on religious, social and political values and institutions of their time too and is a useful reference work with much to offer for cultural studies and literary studies as well as science and history.

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry 'Beyond the Gentility Principle'. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter. William Wootten explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The Alvarez Generation is an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a 'new seriousness' was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide. A new Afterword contains important biographical information on Sylvia Plath and reflects on its implications both for the discussions contained in the book and for the study of Plath's work more generally.

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.

This book draws attention to the pervasive artistic rivalry between Elizabethan poetry and gardens in order to illustrate the benefits of a trans-media approach to the literary culture of the period. In its blending of textual studies with discussions of specific historical patches of earth, The Poem and the Garden demonstrates how the fashions that drove poetic invention were as likely to be influenced by a popular print convention or a particular garden experience as they were by the formal genres of the classical poets. By moving beyond a strictly verbal approach in its analysis of creative imitation, this volume offers new ways of appreciating the kinds of comparative and competitive methods that shaped early modern poetics. Noting shared patterns-both conceptual and material-in these two areas not only helps explain the persistence of botanical metaphors in sixteenth-century books of poetry but also offers a new perspective on the types of contrastive illusions that distinguish the Elizabethan aesthetic. With its interdisciplinary approach, The Poem and the Garden is of interest to all students and scholars who study early modern poetics, book history, and garden studies.

As we approach the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, this timely reissue, first published in 1991, evaluates the function of poetry in wartime Europe, arguing that war poetry must be understood as a social as well as a literary phenomenon. As well as locating the work of well-known French, English and German war poets in a European context, Elizabeth Marsland discusses lesser-known poetry of the war years, including poems by women and the neglected tradition of civilian protest through poetry. Identifying shared characteristics as well as the unique features of each nation's poetry, The Nation's Cause affords new insight into the relationship between nationalism and the social attitudes that determined the conduct of war.