Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in June 2016, and seldom in recent years has it been more richly deserved. That a song writer's lyrics should be regarded as literature was an idea at which many were surprised. Others have felt that to isolate the lyrics of a song from its musical context is unreal. Ultimately that is true: a song is an indefeasible whole, an inseparable marriage of words and music which achieves its overall emotional effect by that symbiosis and not otherwise. Yet it can also be said that the two components can be separately considered as two elements in the artist's creative utterance, and discussed as such. The evidence of Dylan's manuscripts supports the view that in writing his lyrics his way of going about things is not always widely different from that of a poet. Bob Dylan commented on the Nobel Prize in Literature which was awarded to him "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition": "When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was." Voice Without Restraint, refers to and is from the song "I dreamed I saw St Augustine" on John Wesley Harding, and is a phrase chosen to evoke the full-blooded commitment to his artistic utterance which is the hallmark of Bob Dylan's voice - in all senses.

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.

William Blake and the Daughters of Albion offers a challenge to the Blake establishment. By placing some of Blake's early prophetic works in startlingly new historical contexts (most provocatively those of female conduct and pornography) a very different image of the radical Blake emerges. The book shows what can be achieved when a challenging methodology, feminist historicism, is brought to bear on a canonical writer and on now canonized interpretations of his work.

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.

The 12th edition of the International Who's Who in Poetry is a unique and comprehensive guide to the leading lights and freshest talent in poetry today. Containing biographies of more than 4,000 contemporary poets world-wide, this essential reference work provides truly international coverage. The well known poets, as well as talented up-and-coming writers are profiled. CONTENTS:* Each entry provides full career history and publication details * The career profile section is supplemented by lists of Poets Laureate of the United Kingdom and USA, Oxford University professors of poetry, poet winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, winners of the Pulitzer Prize for American Poetry and of the King's/Queen's Gold medal and other poetry prizes * A summary of poetic forms and rhyme schemes * Lists over 8,000 important and influential authors and poets of the last 3,000 years * An international appendices section lists prizes and past prize-winners, organizations, magazines and publishers.

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.

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.

Hugh MacDiarmid (born Christopher Murray Grieve) is a huge, and still controversial, figure in modern Scottish literature. Called variously "the most important figure in Scottish life in the twentieth century" and "a symbol of all that's perfectly hideous in Scotland", his poetry is of historic, and national, significance. Alan Riach's SCOTNOTE study guide outlines MacDiarmid's life and work, providing an overview of the poet's beliefs, opinions and influences, for senior school pupils and students at all levels.

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

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.

"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.

Through an incisive analysis of the emerging debates surrounding urbanization in the Romantic period, together with close readings of poets including William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Stephen Tedeschi explores the notion that the Romantic poets criticized the historical form that the process of urbanization had taken, rather than urbanization itself. The works of the Romantic poets are popularly considered in a rural context and often understood as hostile to urbanization - one of the most profound social transformations of the era. By focusing on the urban aspects of such writing, Tedeschi re-orientates the relationship between urbanization and English Romantic poetry to deliver a study that discovers how the Romantic poets examined not only the influence of urbanization on poetry but also how poetry might help to reshape the form that urbanization could take.

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.

In this revisionary study of the poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth and their friends during the 'revolutionary decade' David Fairer questions the accepted literary history of the period and the critical vocabulary we use to discuss it. The book examines why, at a time of radical upheaval when continuities of all kinds (personal, political, social, and cultural) were being challenged, this group of poets explored themes of inheritance, retrospect, revisiting, and recovery. Organising Poetry charts their struggles to find meaning not through vision and symbol but from connection and dialogue. By placing these poets in the context of an eighteenth-century 'organic' tradition, Fairer moves the emphasis away from the language of idealist 'Romantic' theory towards an empirical stress on how identities are developed and sustained through time. Locke's concept of personal identity as a continued organisation 'partaking of one common life' offered not only a model for a reformed British constitution but a way of thinking about the self, art and friendship, which these poets found valuable. The key term, therefore, is not 'unity' but 'integrity'. In this context of a need to sustain and organise diversity and give it meaning, the book offers original readings of some well known poems of the 1790s, including Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' and 'The Ruined Cottage', and Coleridge's conversation poems 'The Eolian Harp', 'This Lime-Tree Bower', and 'Frost at Midnight'. Organising Poetry represents an important contribution to current critical debates about the nature of poetic creativity during this period and the need to recognise its more communal and collaborative aspects.

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.

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.

This book presents ten new chapters on John Keats's medical imagination, beginning with his practical engagement with dissection and surgery, and the extraordinary poems he wrote during his 'busy time' at Guy's Hospital 1815-17. The Physical Society at Guy's and the demands of a medical career are explored, as are the lyrical spheres of botany, melancholia, and Keats's strange oxymoronic poetics of suspended animation. Here too are links between surveillance of patients at Bedlam and of inner city streets that were walked by the poet of 'To Autumn'. The book concludes with a survey of multiple romantic pathologies of that most Keatsian of diseases, pulmonary tuberculosis.

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.

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.

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.