The romance or chivalric epic was the most popular form of literature in Renaissance Italy. This book shows how it owed its appeal to a successful fusion of traditional, medieval tales of Charlemagne and Arthur with the newer cultural themes developed by the revival of interest in classical antiquity which constitutes the key to Renaissance culture.

Developing a reading of modernist poetics centred on the three-way relationship between literature, modern physics and avant-garde art movements, this book focuses on four key poets - William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Wallace Stevens - whose lives crossed paths in 20th-century New York. This book explores how modernist art movements have shaped these writers' thinking about physics in relation to their work, demonstrating how science's new ideas about measurement and how to visualize material reality provoked innovative poetic forms and images. From Einstein's visit to New York City in 1921 to the impact of the atomic bomb, the author traces the flow of ideas about physics through culture, linking the new physics with modern approaches to art found in Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism.

This edited collection explores the work of highly awarded and twice American Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin. Spanning Merwin's early career, his mid-career success, his Hawaiian epic, his eco-poetry, his lesser-known later poetry and the influence of Buddhism on his work, the volume offers new perspectives on Merwin as a major poet. Exploring his works across the twentieth and twenty-first century, this collection presents Merwin as a necessary and contemporary poet. It emphasizes contemporary readings of Merwin as an environmental advocate, showing how his poetry seeks to help each reader re-establish an intimate relationship with the natural world. It also highlights how Merwin's work presents our place in history as a pivotal moment of transition into a new era of international cooperation. This volume both celebrates his life and writing and takes scholarship on his work forward into the new century.

Of unknown authorship, Beowulf is an Old English epic poem which incites contentious debate and has been endlessly interpreted over the centuries. This Reader's Guide provides a much-needed overview of the large body of Beowulf criticism, moving from eighteenth-century reactions to twenty-first-century responses. Jodi-Ann George: * charts the changes in critical trends and theoretical approaches applied to the poem * includes discussion of J. R. R. Tolkein's pioneering 1936 lecture on Beowulf , and Seamus Heaney's recent translation * analyses Beowulf in popular culture, addressing the poem's life in film versions, graphic novels, music and comics. Clear and engaging, this is an indispensable introductory guide to a widely-studied and enigmatic work which continues to fascinate readers everywhere.

By bringing together Milton specialists with other innovative early modern scholars, the collection aims to embrace and encourage a methodologically adventurous study of Milton's works, analyzing them both in relation to their own moment and their many ensuing contexts.

Viewing the Iliad and myth through the lens of modern psychology, in Becoming Achilles: Child-Sacrifice, War, and Misrule in the Iliad and Beyond, Richard Holway shows how the epic underwrites individual and communal catharsis and denial. Sacrificial childrearing generates but also threatens agonistic, glory-seeking ancient Greek cultures. Not only aggression but knowledge of sacrificial parenting must be purged. Just as Zeus contrives to have threats to his regime play out harmlessly (to him) in the mortal realm, so the Iliad dramatizes threats to Archaic and later Greek cultures in the safe arena of poetic performance. The epic represents in displaced form destructive mother-son and father-daughter liaisons and resulting strife within and between generations. Holway calls into question the Iliad's (and many scholars') presentation of Achilles as a hero who speaks truth to power, learns through suffering, and exemplifies kingly virtues that Agamemnon lacks. So too the Iliad's cathartic process, whether conceived as purging innate aggression or arriving at moral clarity. Instead, Holway argues, Achilles (and Socrates) try to prove they are not what at bottom they experience themselves to be-needy, defenseless children, who fear to acknowledge, much less speak out against, parents' use of them to meet parents' needs. What emerges from Holway's analysis is not only a new reading of the Iliad, from its first word to its last, but a revised account of the family dynamics underlying ancient Greek cultures.

The Funambulists brings together the diverse poetry collections of six contemporary Arab diasporic women poets. Spanning multiple languages and regions, this volume illuminates the distinct artistic voice of each poet, yet also highlights the aesthetic and political relevance that unites their work. Marchi explores the work of Naomi Shihab Nye, a celebrated American poet of Palestinian descent; Iman Mersal, an Egyptian poet living in Edmonton, Canada, who writes in Arabic; Nadine Ltaif, a Lebanese poet who lives in Quebec and has adopted French as her language; Maram al-Massri, a Syrian poet writing in Arabic and living in France; Suheir Hammad, an American poet of Palestinian origin; and Mina Boulhanna, a Moroccan poet living in Italy and writing in Italian. Despite their varying geographical and political backgrounds, these poets find common ground in themes of injustice, spirituality, gender, race, and class. Drawing upon the concept of tension, Marchi examines both the breaking points and the creative energies that traverse the poetic works of these writers. These celebrated funambulists use their art of balance and flexibility bolstered by their courage and transgression to walk a tightrope stretched out across cultures, faiths, and nations.

Perhaps the most powerful feature of the Romantic imagination is its ability to dissolve existing form and order and create it anew. The Romantic investigation of the functions of the imagination also leads to important insights concerning its problems and dangers. Because it separates the person experiencing it from others around him, the imagination introduces ways of seeing which cannot be assumed to be simply communicable or easily shared, and which have as their objects different forms or 'things'. These forms, or figures, risk becoming for their originators both vehicles of power, in so far as they do convince others of their reality, and limiting constructs of prefigured order, inhibiting their users from the perception of new relations and alternative meanings. When the figured becomes the real, there thus arise difficulties in both individual and social perceptions. Arguing from the stance that all perception takes place by a creative (and hence potentially divisive) assembly of images or qualities into things, David Simpson shows that the analysis of figurative representation in Wordsworth's writing is of central importance to his idea of the human mind, and the way in which it is affected or allowed to function by its environment, both human and physical. In this way Wordsworth's ideas about the function of literature in society are seen to be more fully worked out than readers have often assumed them to be. Simpson pays particular attention to the ethical consequences of different ways of figuring the real, offering an explanation of Wordsworth's distinction between life in the town and life among the mountains and lakes of north-west England. In relating Wordsworth's poetry to important contemporary debates in political economy such as those concerning the division of labour and the evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of commerce and luxury, he suggests that Wordsworth is a notable precursor of that nineteenth-century tradition which sees the mind as open to critical determination by social and environmental factors.

In the midst of an age of prejudice, John Selden's immense, neglected rabbinical works contain magnificent Hebrew scholarship that respects, to an extent remarkable for the times, the self-understanding of Judaism. Scholars celebrated for their own broad and deep learning gladly conceded Selden's superiority and conferred on him titles such as "the glory of the English nation" (Hugo Grotius), "Monarch in letters" (Ben Jonson), "the chief of learned men reputed in this land" (John Milton). Although scholars have examined Selden (1584-1654) as a political theorist, legal and constitutional historian, and parliamentarian, Renaissance England's Chief Rabbi is the first book-length study of his rabbinic and especially talmudic publications, which take up most of the six folio volumes of his complete works and constitute his most mature scholarship. It traces the cultural influence of these works on some early modern British poets and intellectuals, including Jonson, Milton, Andrew Marvell, James Harrington, Henry Stubbe, Nathanael Culverwel, Thomas Hobbes, and Isaac Newton. It also explores some of the post-biblical Hebraic ideas that served as the foundation of Selden's own thought, including his identification of natural law with a set of universal divine laws of perpetual obligation pronounced by God to our first parents in paradise and after the flood to the children of Noah. Selden's discovery in the Talmud and in Maimonides' Mishneh Torah of shared moral rules in the natural, pre-civil state of humankind provides a basis for relationships among human beings anywhere in the world. The history of the religious toleration of Jews in England is incomplete without acknowledgment of theimpact of Selden's uncommonly generous Hebrew scholarship.

This collation from Samuel T. Coleridge's contributions to the theory of language presents an imposing revision of the enlightenment approach to language. Selections from his verse, notebooks, journalism and ephemera are arranged under headings including the language of politics; language and culture; the language of poetry; theory of language; words and things; organ of language; and the language of religion. The editor's introduction situates Coleridge's thinking in its period, and with modern theory in mind.

A study of tragedies, comedies, romances, and histories, this book examines the dynamic interplay of three concepts--gender, text, and habitat--as metaphors for cross-cultural definition. The book focuses on the cross-cultural experience, arguing that Shakespeare reinterprets, refashions, and reinscribes stage aliens such as Jews, Moors, Amazons and gypsies and thus interrogates a Eurocentric perspective and the caricatures that cultures create of one another. Writing in an accessible, compelling style, de Sousa recovers a wealth of information on race and gender relations in early modern Europe.

Composed towards the end of the first century CE, Statius' Thebaid relates the myth of the 'Seven against Thebes': the assault of the seven champions of Argos on the ancient city in a bid to oust Eteocles, son of Oedipus, from his throne in favour of his brother, Polynices. Book 2 presents several key events in the build-up to the Theban war: Eteocles' haunting by the ghost of his grandfather Laius, the ill-omened weddings of Polynices and his ally Tydeus to the princesses of Argos, and Tydeus' failed embassy to Eteocles, leading to his famed victory over a Theban ambush. This volume represents the first full-length scholarly commentary in English on Book 2 of the twelve-book Latin epic, greatly expanding on and updating Mulder's 1954 Latin language commentary. An extensive introduction covers the poem's historical, textual, and literary contexts, with particular attention to Statius' adaptation of prior literary tradition and especially the epics of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Valerius Flaccus, and Silius Italicus. The Latin text, accompanied by a clear translation and apparatus criticus, is newly edited to take advantage of the recent detailed editorial work on the poem by Hall, Ritchie, and Edwards and is supplemented by a comprehensive and incisive line-by-line commentary which addresses a range of textual, linguistic, and literary topics. The result is a keenly focused yet accessible critical edition that will be of interest both to specialist scholars of Latin poetry and to advanced graduate students studying Flavian epic.

The fabled cities of Italy--Florence, Venice, and Rome--have each acquired a distinctive tradition of literary representation involving characteristic, recurrent motifs and symbolic signatures. A wealth of writing on each is examined in fiction and poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries mainly by British and American authors. Included are works by Robert Browning on Florence and Rome; George Eliot, W.D. Howells, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence on Florence; Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, L.P. Hartley, and Anthony Hecht on Venice; Arthur Hugh Clough, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, and Aldous Huxley on Rome; and Henry James and Bernard Malamud on Florence, Venice, and Rome.

The analysis points to Florence frequently being depicted in terms of binary oppositions, including Hebraism versus Hellenism, past versus present, stasis versus movement, and light versus darkness. Venetian narratives are commonly infused with motifs relating to dream and unreality, obsession, voyeurism, isolation, melancholia, and death. History is a controlling metaphor for Roman fiction and poetry, combined with the motif of change and, especially, fall from innocence to experience. Ross shows how writers have self-consciously built on the literary conventions set earlier and anticipates that these cities will remain natural loci for continued post-modernist experiment. In a wider theoretical framework, he examines this writing identified with place for the light it sheds on the issue of the importance of setting in literature.

In this sequel to his Romantic Consciousness, John Beer discusses further questionings of human consciousness: both the degree to which Dickens's conscious dramatizing differs from the subconscious workings of his psyche and the exploration of subliminal consciousness by nineteenth-century psychical researchers. Discussions of questions of "Being" by thinkers such as Heidegger, Sartre and Havel are accompanied by the assertion that creative writers such as Woolf and Lawrence, followed by Hughes and Plath, showed a deeper debt than philosophical contemporaries to their Romantic predecessors.

Since its first appearance in 1962, M. L. Rosenthal's classic selection of Yeats's poems and plays has attracted hundreds of thousands of readers. This newly revised edition includes 211 poems and 4 plays. It adds The Words Upon the Window-Pane, one of Yeats's most startling dramatic works in its realistic use of a seance as the setting for an eerily powerful reenactment of Jonathan Swift's rigorous idealism, baffling love relationships, and tragic madness. The collection profits from recent scholarship that has helped to establish Yeats's most reliable texts, in the order set by the poet himself. And his powerful lyrical sequences are amply represented, culminating in the selection from Last Poems and Two Plays, which reaches its climax in the brilliant poetic plays The Death of Cuchulain and Purgatory.

Scholars, students, and all who delight in Yeats's varied music and sheer quality will rejoice in this expanded edition. As the introduction observes, "Early and late he has the simple, indispensable gift of enchanting the ear....He was also the poet who, while very much of his own day in Ireland, spoke best to the people of all countries. And though he plunged deep into arcane studies, his themes are most clearly the general ones of life and death, love and hate, man's condition, and history's meanings. He began as a sometimes effete post-Romantic, heir to the pre-Raphaelites, and then, quite naturally, became a leading British Symbolist; but he grew at last into the boldest, most vigorous voice of this century." Selected Poems and Four Plays represents the essential achievement of the greatest twentieth-century poet to write in English.

The "kissing-poem" genre was wide-spread in Renaissance literature; this book surveys its form and development. There is a great deal of kissing in Renaissance poetry, but modern critics do not generally recognise (as early readers did) that the literary conventions of the kiss were closely related to a fully-formed, lively and popular genre of Neo-Latin "kissing-poems". Beginning with the imitation of Catullus in fifteenth-century Italy, this specialised form was securely established in the next century by the Dutch poet Janus Secundus, whose elegant Basia ("Kisses") were an extraordinary international success. Secundus stimulated a long-lived tradition of Latin and vernacular "kisses", willfully repetitious and yet meticulously varied, which can tell us much about humanist poetics. This book offers a critical account of the Renaissance kiss-poem, using an abundance of vivid and often racy examples, many of them drawn from authors who are all but forgotten today. It shows that the genre had a sophisticated rationale and clear but flexible conventions. These include habits of irony, mood and structure that proved widely influential, and some slippery, self-conscious ways of dealing with masculine sexuality. Presenting new readings of English writers including Sidney, Shakespeare and Donne, the study also reminds us how important Neo-Latin writing was to the literary culture of early modern Britain. A number of well known texts are thus placed in a context unfamiliar to most modern scholars, in order to show how deftly their kisses engage with an international tradition of humanist poetry. Alex Wong is currently a Research Fellow in English literature at St John's College, University of Cambridge.

Love Songs (1917) is a poetry collection by Sara Teasdale. The poet's fourth collection, for which she was awarded the 1918 Pulitzer Prize, is a masterful collection of lyric poems meditating on life, romance, and the natural world. Somber and celebratory, symbolic and grounded in experience, Love Songs revels in the mystery of existence itself. From despair to elation, confusion to security, Sara Teasdale captures the many emotions at work in the hearts of lovers. In "November," she explores the strange feeling that accompany a relationship nearing a mutual ending: "The world is tired, the year is old, / The fading leaves are glad to die, / The wind goes shivering with cold / Where the brown reeds are dry." Beginning her brief verse with an observation of autumn, Teasdale moves into a bittersweet stanza on love grown stagnant, mirroring the world approaching winter: "Our love is dying like the grass, / And we who kissed grow coldly kind, / Half glad to see our old love pass / Like leaves along the wind." So far from spring, the only thing certain is that these lovers must part ways. Refusing to romanticize love, to portray it as wholly positive or negative, the poet crafts a timeless collection on a timeless theme. For Teasdale, a poet who merges an abiding affection for flora and fauna with a critical distance from human affairs, the belief in the life of the world, with or without us, is enough. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Sara Teasdale's Love Songs is a classic work of American poetry reimagined for modern readers.

<I>John Clare, Politics and Poetry</I> challenges the traditional portrait of "poor John Clare", the helpless victim of personal and professional circumstance. Clare's career has been presented as a disaster of editorial heavy-handedness, condescension, a poor market, and conservative patronage. Yet Clare was not a passive victim. This study explores the sources of the "poor Clare"' tradition, and recovers Clare's agency, revealing a writer fully engaged in his own professional life and in the social and political questions of the day.

Andrew Marvell's Liminal Lyrics: The Space Between is an interdisciplinary study of the major lyric poems of seventeenth-century British metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell. The poet and his work have generally proven enigmatic to scholars because both refuse to fit into normal categories and expectations. This study invites Marvell readers to view the poet and some of his representative lyrics in the context of the anthropological concept of liminality as developed by Victor Turner and enriched by Arnold Van Gennep, Jacques Lacan, and other observers of the in-between aspects of experience. The approach differs from previous attempts to "explain" Marvell in that it allows multidisciplinary and multi-media contexts in a broad matrix of the areas of experience and representation that defy boundaries, that blur the line at which entrance becomes exit. This study acknowledges that the poems discussed, and, by implication, the entire corpus of Marvell's work and the life that produced it, derive from a refusal to draw a definite divide. In analyzing a small selection of Marvell's life and lyrics as explorations of various realms of liminality in word and image, readers can see a passageway to the poet's works that never really reaches a destination; instead, the unlimited possibilities of the journey remain. Thus, the in-between aspects of the poet and his poetry actually define his technique as well as his brilliance.

An exploration of the legacy of The Waste Land on the centenary of its original publication, looking at the impact it had had upon criticism and new poetries across one hundred years. T. S. Eliot first published his long poem The Waste Land in 1922. The revolutionary nature of the work was immediately recognised, and it has subsequently been acknowledged as one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century, and as crucial for the understanding of modernism. The essays in this collection variously reflect on The Waste Land one hundred years after its original publication. At this centenary moment, the contributors both celebrate the richness of the work, its sounds and rare use of language, and also consider the poem's legacy in Britain, Ireland, and India. The work here, by an international team of writers from the UK, North America, and India, deploys a range of approaches. Some contributors seek to re-read the poem itself in fresh and original ways; others resist the established drift of previous scholarship on the poem, and present new understandings of the process of its development through its drafts, or as an orchestration on the page. Several contributors question received wisdom about the poem's immediate legacy in the decade after publication, and about the impact that it has had upon criticism and new poetries across the first century of its existence. An Introduction to the volume contextualises the poem itself, and the background to the essays. All pieces set out to review the nature of our understanding of the poem, and to bring fresh eyes to its brilliance, one hundred years on. Contributors: Rebecca Beasley, Rosinka Chaudhuri, William Davies, Hugh Haughton, Marjorie Perloff, Andrew Michael Roberts, Peter Robinson, Michael Wood.

This book examines the influence of American poetry on Seamus Heaney's achievement by close attention to the themes, style, and resonances of his poetry at different stages of his career, including his appointments in Berkeley and Harvard. Beginning with an examination of Heaney's education at Queen's University, this study presents comparative close readings which explore the influence of five American poets he read during this period: Robert Frost, John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop. Laverty demonstrates how Heaney returned to several of these poets in response to difficulty and to consolidate later aesthetic developments. Heaney's ambivalent critical treatment of Sylvia Plath is investigated, as is his partial misreading of Bishop, who is understood today more sensitively than in her lifetime. This study also probes the reasons for his elision of other prominent American writers, making this the first comprehensive assessment of American influence on Heaney's poetry.

The great Romantic poet Lord Byron starved himself compulsively for most of his life. His behaviour mystified his friends and other witnesses, yet he never imagined he was ill. Instead, he rationalised his behaviour as a fight for spiritual freedom and made it the cornerstone of his heroic ideal, which was central to his work and to his life and his death. This fresh biographical study aims to explore neglected or misunderstood aspects of his private life to illuminate his writing, his affairs with women, his passion for Napoleon and his conflicted friendships with Coleridge and Shelley. This in turn leads to a new understanding of his masterpiece, Don Juan. 15 July 2019 marks the 200th anniversary of its first publication. Antony Peattie situates these patterns of behaviour in a vividly rendered contemporary world, culminating in Byron's last days in Greece, where he tried to starve himself into heroic leadership but damaged his constitution, resulting in his death at the age of thirty-six.