Attention Equals Life examines why a quest to pay attention to daily life has increasingly become a central feature of both contemporary American poetry and the wider culture of which it is a part. Drawing on theories and debates about the nature of everyday life from a number of fields across the humanities, this book traces the modern history of this preoccupation and consider why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that it is no coincidence that a potent hunger for everyday life explodes in the post-1945 period. This deep cultural need should be seen as a reaction to the rapid and dislocating cultural, political, and social transformations of this epoch, which have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction, interruption, and fragmented attention. The book argues that poetry is an important, and perhaps unlikely, cultural form that has mounted a response, and even method of resistance, to a culture gradually losing its capacity to pay attention. It examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday becomes predominant in the decades after modernism, why it has so often led to unusual, challenging projects and formal innovation, and why poetry, in particular, might be an everyday-life genre par excellence. The book considers the variety of forms this preoccupation takes, and examines its aesthetic, philosophical, and political ramifications. By exploring the use of innovative strategies, unusual projects, and new technologies as methods of attending to dailiness, Attention Equals Life uncovers an important strain at the heart of twentieth and twenty-first century literature.

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-eight original essays, by an international team of scholar-critics, to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. Nineteen essays explore the highlights of a long career systematically, giving special prominence to the lyric Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads and the Poems in Two Volumes and to the blank verse poet of 'The Recluse'. Most of the other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship. This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present, in turn, Wordsworth's life, career, and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of 'The Recluse'; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work, from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture in such fields as gender, landscape, psychology, ethics, politics, religion and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception-most importantly by poets, but also in modern criticism and scholarship.

William Blake's The Four Zoas is one of the most challenging poems in the English language, and one of the most profound. It is also one of the least read of the major poetic narratives of the Romantic period. Spiritual History presents a much-needed introduction to the poem, although it will also be of great interest to those already familiar with it. This is the first full-length study to examine in detail Blake's numerous manuscript revisions of the poem. It offers a staged reading, one that moves, as Blake himself moved, from simpler to more complex forms of writing. Andrew Lincoln reads the poem in the light of two competing views of history: the biblical, which places history within the framework of Fall and Judgement, and that of the Enlightenment, which sees history as progress from primitive life to civil order. In so doing, he offers an account of the narrative that is more coherent - and accessible - than much previous criticism of the work, and Blake's much misunderstood poem emerges as the most extraordinary product of the eighteenth-century tradition of philosophical history.