Blake's 'Human Form Divine' has long commanded the spotlight. Beastly Blake shifts focus to the non-human creatures who populate Blake's poetry and designs. The author of 'The Tyger' and 'The Lamb' was equally struck by the 'beastliness' and the beauty of the animal kingdom, the utter otherness of animal subjectivity and the meaningful relationships between humans and other creatures. 'Conversing with the Animal forms of wisdom night & day', Blake fathomed how much they have to teach us about creation and eternity. This collection ranges from real animals in Blake's surroundings, to symbolic creatures in his mythology, to animal presences in his illustrations of Virgil, Dante, Hayley, and Stedman. It makes a third to follow Queer Blake and Sexy Blake in irreverently illuminating blind spots in Blake criticism. Beastly Blake will reward lovers of Blake's writing and visual art, as well as those interested in Romanticism and animal studies.

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) is one of the great undiscovered geniuses of Victorian literature. His poetry expresses the religious doubt of the age as well as exposing its sexual hypocrisy. His life is packed full of relationships and encounters with some of the great names of the 19th century; Florence Nightingale, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cardinal Newman, Tennyson, the Arnolds and so on. Clough's early death at the age of 42, worn down, it is said, by working as a factotum for Nightingale, was widely seen as a personal tragedy of unfulfilled promise. Now Kenny, the distinguished philosopher and former Master of Balliol College, Oxford, proposes to write three first major biography of Clough in thirty years. It is a task that has attracted others- Claire Tomalin for example- but Kenny is supremely qualified to do so. Not only is he already the editor of Clough's diaries, he has unrivalled insights into the world that contributed to Clough's tortured existence and has a lifelong knowledge of Clough's work. Additionally, Kenny has access to letters and other papers at Balliol, which have never been used by any biographer. In Kenny's biography, Clough will be re-established as one of the great Victorian poets (a judgement shared by Christopher Ricks in his 1987 Oxford Book of Victorian Verse) and also a significant personality of the Victorian stage.

The poetry of the Great War is among the most powerful ever written in the English language. Unique for its immediacy and searing honesty, it has made a fundamental contribution to our understanding of and response to war and the suffering it creates. Widely acclaimed as an indispensable guide to the Great War poets and their work, Out of Battle explores in depth the variety of responses from Rupert Brook, Ford Madox Ford, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Issac Rosenberg and Edward Thomas to the events they witnessed. Other poets discussed are Hardy, Kipling, Charles Sorely, Ivor Gurney, Herbert Read, Richard Aldington and David Jones. For the second edition of Out of Battle , a substantial new preface has been added together with an appendix on the unresolved problems concerning the Owen manuscripts. An updated bibliography provides useful guidance for further reading.

This book offers a new reading of Marcell Mauss' and Lewis Hyde's theories of poetry as gift, exploring poetry exchanges within 20th and 21st century communities of poets, publishers, audiences and readers operating along a gift economy. The text considers trans-Atlantic case studies across fields of performance and ecopoetics, small press publishing and poetry institutions, with focus on Joan Retallack, Bob Holman, Anne Waldman, Bob Cobbing, and feminist performance. Elizabeth-Jane Burnett focuses on innovative poetry that resists commodification, drawing on ethnography to show parallels with gift giving tribal societies; she also considers the ethical, philosophical and psychological motivations for such exchanges with particular reference to poethics. This book will appeal to researchers in modern poetry, poetry teachers, advanced students of modern literature, and those with an interest in poetry.

Modernity is made and unmade by the anecdotal. Conceived as a literary genre, a narrative element of criticism, and, most crucially, a mode of historiography, the anecdote illuminates the convergences as well as the fault lines cutting across modern practices of knowledge production. The volume explores uses of the anecdotal in exemplary case studies from the threshold of the early modern to the present.

In Signs that Sing, Heather Maring argues that oral tradition, religious ritual, and literate Latin-based practices are dynamically interconnected in Old English poetry. Resisting the tendency to study these different forms of expression separately, this book contends that poets combined them in hybrid techniques that were important to the early development of English literature. Maring examines a variety of texts, including Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, The Dream of the Rood, and the Advent Lyrics, and shows how themes from oral tradition became metaphors for sacred concepts in the hands of Christian authors and how oral performance and religious liturgy influenced written poetry. The result, she demonstrates, is richly elaborate verse filled with shared symbols and themes that a wide range of audiences could understand and find meaningful.

This unique collection of lectures honors the pioneering work in Byron studies of Leslie Alexis Marchand, who has had an enduring influence on the appreciation and study of Lord Byron for sixty years. Generations of readers and writers have come to Byron through his biographies and his edition of the poet's letters and journals. All admirers of Byron respond to the verve, dash, and immediacy of his correspondence, which lies at the heart of Marchand's biographies and offers us a portrait based on the poet's views of himself and his times. No one has so powerfully and judiciously allowed Byron's life to emerge from the testimony of his letters. Many readers, from his contemporaries to our day, have refused to separate the poet from his troubled dark heroes, and see little but strands of autobiography in the poems. But the letters and journals reveal him in a very different light. Leslie Marchand provided these documents for the first time in their unexpurgated and authoritative form. This collection pays tribute to Marchand's careful scholarship and scrupulous attention to the limits of interpretation. Marchand's continued relevance to Byron studies derives in part from the work undertaken by those inspired by his labors as editor and interpreter; many of whom are represented in this collection. Three opening essays bear personal witness to his fervent support for young scholars, his depth of expertise and appeal as a teacher, and his commitment to encouraging others to join him on his Byron pilgrimage. The lectures themselves represent such diverse disciplines as literary theory, psychiatry, publishing history, comparative literature, drama, political history, revolutionary politics in literature and music, literary criticism, textual editing and selection, and literary influence. A chronology and a bibliography provide an overview of his life and scholarship.

Take a walk through this amazing collection of poems and drawings by Birgitta Lindsey. Here, you will meet The Toothpaste Fairy, visit a place where the rule says: "No Grown-Ups Allowed," and meet an unlikely hero named Willy Walton. You will discover how Peanut Butter Soup is made, find out just what happens when you drink Truth Potion, and learn how to turn an Upside Down Frown into a smile. Sure to be loved by children and adults alike, "Peanut Butter Soup" is a magical ride that you won't want to end!

Hailed as one of the most powerful and moving poets of his generation, Galway Kinnell has been commended by critics who often pair his name with such famous predecessors as Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, W. B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Theodore Roethke. Born on February 1, 1927, Galway Kinnell has been working on the strength and truthfulness of his voice for almost five decades now. This well-written work offers a very important perspective on a major living poet, focusing specifically on what is a key theme in Kinnell's work--death. The author's thematic analysis does not stop short with a direct reading of the poetry, it also seeks to place her subject within several contexts, including that problematic pivotal position between Modernism and Postmodernism, and a specific poetic tradition (including T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Whitman and Dickinson). What emerges from the readings of Kinnell's various poetry collections is essentially an extended philosophical meditation on death, that both offers itself as a commentary whilst also repeatedly showing, with much clarity, how complex a subject death is for Kinnell. This meditation on death also means a deep consideration of those other large themes that have asserted themselves in American poetry--transcendentalism, nature, and life itself magnified against the darkness of death in the poet's work. This volume will make an important contribution to research on Kinnell and the author's ability to follow her subject into a very complex labyrinth of philosophical and aesthetic discussions, while always being mindful that Kinnell remains central, offers much in the way of a good example of literary analysis and scholarship. This book makes a significant contribution to scholarship on Galway Kinnell, a major contemporary poet whose work will receive more and more attention over the coming years. In addition, this work also marks a contribution to scholarship on poetry, American literature and contemporary literature, as well as to the fascination with death as a theme in much of American literature, from Dickinson and Poe to Plath and Salinger. Death in the Works of Galway Kinnell will be a very valuable resource for students and teachers of contemporary poetry and American literature.

Several thousand letters to and from Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning have survived, together with other information on the composition and context of works from Barrett's 'lines on virtue' written at the age of eight in 1814 to Browning's Asolando (1889). The Chronology seeks to guide readers through this mass of material in three main sections: youth, contrasting early backgrounds and careers, and growing interest in each other's work to 1845; courtship, marriage, Italy, and work including Aurora Leigh and Men and Women (1845-61); Browning's later life of relentless socializing and prolific writing from his return to London to his death in Venice in 1889. The book provides not only precise dating but much matter on such topics as the Brownings' extensive reading in English, French and classical literature, their many friendships, and their sometimes conflicting political beliefs.

This book explores the relationship between nineteenth-century poetry and liberal philosophy. It carries out a reassessment of the aesthetic possibilities of liberalism and it considers the variety of ways that poetry by William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, George Meredith, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and Algernon Charles Swinburne responds to and participates in urgent philosophical, social and political debates about liberty and the rule of law. It provides an account of poetry's intervention into four different sites where liberalism has a stake: the self, the university, married life and the nation state and it seeks to assert the peculiar capacity of poetry to articulate liberal concerns, proposing poetic language as a means of liberal enquiry.

Taking a cognitive approach, this book asks what poetry, and in particular Holocaust poetry, does to the reader - and to what extent the translation of this poetry can have the same effects. It is informed by current theoretical discussion and features many practical examples. Holocaust poetry differs from other genres of writing about the Holocaust in that it is not so much concerned to document facts as to document feelings and the sense of an experience. It shares the potential of all poetry to have profound effects on the thoughts and feelings of the reader. This book examines how the openness to engagement that Holocaust poetry can engender, achieved through stylistic means, needs to be preserved in translation if the translated poem is to function as a Holocaust poem in any meaningful sense. This is especially true when historical and cultural distance intervenes. The first book of its kind and by a world-renowned scholar and translator, this is required reading.

Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

W.-H. Friedrich's "Verwundung und Tod in Der Ilias" was originally published in 1956. Never before translated into English, its importance has slowly come to be recognised: first, because it discusses in detail the plausibility (or otherwise) of the wounds received on the Homeric battlefield and is therefore of considerable interest to historians of medicine; and second, because it makes a serious and sustained effort to grapple with the question of style, and thus confronts an issue which oral theory has scarcely touched. Peter Jones adds a Preface briefly locating the work within the terms of oral theory; Kenneth Saunders, Emeritus Professor of Medicine at St George's Hospital Medical School, London, updates Friedrich's medical analyses in a full Appendix.

This book features a collection of essays on some of the key poets of post-war America, written by leading scholars in the field. All the essays have been newly commissioned to take account of the diverse movements in American poetry since 1945, and also to reflect, retrospectively, on some of the major talents that have shaped its development. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American poets took stock of their own tumultuous past but faced the future with radically new artistic ideals and commitments. More than ever before, American poetry spoke with its own distinctive accents and declared its own dreams and desires. This is the era of confessionalism, beat poetry, protest poetry, and avant-garde postmodernism. This book explores the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Plath, as well as contemporary African American poets and new poetic voices emerging in the 21st century. This New Casebook introduces the major American poets of the post-war generation, evaluates their achievements in the light of changing critical opinion, and offers lively, incisive readings of some of the most challenging and enthralling poetry of the modern era.

This book focuses on W. B. Yeats's critical writings, an aspect of his oeuvre which has been given limited treatment so far. It traces his critical work from his earliest articles, through to his occult treatises, and all the way to his last pamphlets, in which he sought to delineate the idea of a literary culture: a community of people willing to credit poetry with the central role in imagining and organising social praxis throughout society. The chapters of this study investigate the contexts in which Yeats's thought developed, his many disputes over the shape of Irish cultural politics, the future of poetry and the place literature occupies in the world. What transpires is an image of Yeats who is strung between the impulses of faith in the existence of a supernatural order and ironic scepticism as to the possibility of ever capturing that order in language. This study is distinguished by its grounding of Yeats's critical agenda in a broader context through textual analysis. In addition, it organises and systematises his conceptions of poetry and its social role through its approach to his criticism as a fully-fledged area of his artistic practice. The monograph has been written within the framework of the project financed by The National Science Centre, Cracow, Poland, pursuant to the decision number DEC-2013/09/D/HS2/02782.

Winner of the Ezra Pound Society Book Prize 2014 Ezra Pound's sustained use of ancient and medieval philosophical sources, particularly those within the Neoplatonic tradition, is well known. Yet the specific influence of the ninth-century theologian Johannes Scottus Eriugena on Pound's poetry and prose has received limited scholarly attention. Pound developed detailed plans to publish a commentary on Eriugena alongside his translations of two of the books of Confucianism, plans that ultimately went unrealised. Drawing on unpublished notes, drafts and manuscripts amongst the Ezra Pound papers held at Yale University, this book investigates the pivotal role of Eriugena in Pound's thought and, perhaps surprisingly, in his deployment of non-Western philosophical traditions.

Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

This superb introduction to the work of the famous Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1886-1966) begins with an account of her life in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and Stalinist Russia, and focuses principally on her poetry. Incorporating all recent scholarship, the author traces the way in which Akhmatova's work reflects the tumultuous times in which she lived, and her emergence as the spokeswoman of her generation, to provide a long overdue account of her entire career.