Key Features: Study methods Introduction to the text Summaries with critical notes Themes and techniques Textual analysis of key passages Author biography Historical and literary background Modern and historical critical approaches Chronology Glossary of literary terms

This series contains poetry and prose anthologies composed of writers from across the English-speaking world. Parts of Songs of Ourselves Volume 1 are set for study in Cambridge IGCSE (R), O Level and Cambridge International AS & A Level Literature in English syllabuses. The anthology includes work from over 100 poets, combining famous names - such as William Wordsworth, Maya Angelou and Seamus Heaney - with lesser-known voices. This helps students create fresh and interesting contrasts as they explore themes that range from love to death.

In this introduction to the life and works of John Keats, originally published in 1981, William Walsh presents a comprehensive but approachable study which illuminates first the poems, indirectly the man, and more obliquely the period. Working within a biographical framework, the author looks at Keats from the point of view of the development of his art and sensibility, examining all the major poems and relating them to the letters; reference is made throughout the book to the best contemporary critical writing on the subject and a select bibliography is provided.

This book is the result of investiging whether Ode to a Nightingale could be interpreted as the record of an actual song that moved Keats so deeply as to involve, in Jung's terms, an experience of the Self. . It is in effect a biographical study of one aspect of Keats' life of the imagination. It suggests why he became a poet, shows how his attitude to his poetry changed, how in Jungian terms he first met his 'shadow', rejected it, then came to accept it, and how this affected his poetry. The meaning of the few psychological terms used in the book are clarified by illustration from Keats' own writing, thus contributing to its understanding at the same time. An intimate relationship between his letters and the poems is shown. First published in 1964, the study throws light on well-worn themes such as what Keats meant by beauty, his theory of 'negative capability', why he abandoned Hyperion. It gives a fresh interpretation of Endymion and of aspects of the two versions of Hyperion, Lamia, The Eve of St Agnes, and the other great odes. Among details is has something to say on why La Belle Dame kissed her knight precisely four times.

The Event of Style in Literature brings discussions about the question of style up-to-date by schematising the principal issues relating to the topic through a critical overview of the canon of style studies. It reads the work of Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, and Hans-Georg Gadamer as groundbreaking and 'eventful' interventions.

This is the first study to examine the Arabic translations of a number of major modern poems in the English language, in particular T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. With case studies dedicated to the Arab translators who were themselves modernist poets, including Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Saadi Yusuf, the author brings a reading of the translations as literary works in their own right. Revealing why the Arab modernists were drawn to these poems through situational context, Ghareeb Iskander shows that the influence exerted by the English originals stems from the creative manner in which the Arab poet-translators converted them into their own language.

This complete scholarly edition of the poems of Jones Very (1813-80) provides the requisite materials for a major reappraisal of his work and standing among the significant figures of American Transcendentalism. Collecting 862 poems, the volume makes available for the first time all of Very's known poems, including much previously unpublished or uncollected material. Very, a New England Transcendentalist and a protege of Ralph Waldo Emerson, is one of the underrated American poets of the nineteenth century. Though he attracted a select audience in his day, serious study of Very's work in this century has been hampered by the lack of a complete, convenient, and reliable edition of his poetry. Perhaps even more discouraging to readers of older collections of Very's poems has been the puzzling variance in the style and quality of the verse. This edition, in which the poems are dated and chronologically arranged, reveals the three stages of Very's poetic development, out of which the distinctive genius of the second period clearly emerges. Written under the influence of a powerful psychological/spiritual experience, the ecstatic utterances of this period are by turns breathless in their intensity and tranquil in their serene contentment. This complete edition presents a critical, unmodernized, clear-text version of each poem, reflecting as nearly as possible the author's final intention. A textual introduction outlines editorial procedures and problems, and a general introduction places Very among his contemporaries, discusses the mystical experience that transformed his life and poetry, reviews the major related criticism, and assesses his poetic achievements. Historical notes and a full textual apparatus complete the edition.

"Reader's Guides" provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works. Each guide also offers students fresh critical insights and provides a practical introduction to close reading and to analysing literary language and form. They provide up-to-date, authoritative but accessible guides to the most commonly studied classic texts. William Blake is a romantic poet who remains popular today, in part because his exceptional insight into psychological, political and social issues remains powerfully relevant. The "Reader's Guide" begins by introducing Blake's major themes including religious, political and social issues and then moves on to reading key works, including "Songs of Innocence and Experience" and "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell". It offers an invaluable introduction to reading Blake's poetry and includes sections on its contexts, language and style, critical reception and adaptation and influence and finally, an annotated guide to further reading.

Almost a half century after his death in 1953, the Welsh author Dylan Thomas continues to capture the attention of scholars and critics. Though he attained some measure of fame before he died, he never enjoyed financial prosperity. His life was plagued with difficulties of all kinds, and he was only 39 years old at the time of his death. Some of his works, such as "Fern Hill" and "Do not go gentle into that good night" are frequently included in anthologies, and Thomas is now often considered one of the most important and original poets of the 20th century. During his trips to the United States, he read his works to large audiences on college campuses. He also made a number of radio broadcasts and recordings, and his moving voice made scores of listeners respond emotionally to his poems. Though Dylan Thomas has earned his place in literary history, readers often find his poems difficult to understand. This reference book is a valuable guide to his life and work. Because his writings are so very much a product of his troubled life, the volume begins with an insightful biography that provides a context for understanding Thomas's works. The second section then systematically overviews his works. While his poems receive much attention, the section also includes discussions of his prose works, his filmscripts, and his broadcasts. A third section then surveys the critical and scholarly response to his writings, with separate chapters detailing his reception in Wales, England, and North America. A selected bibliography lists editions of Thomas's works, along with the most important general studies of his writings.

The Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion discusses how and why the sonnet appeals to Irish poets and has grown in popularity over the last century. Using a thematic approach, Tara Guissin-Stubbs argues for the significance of the Irish sonnet as a discrete entity within modern and contemporary poetry, and shows how the Irish sonnet has become a debating chamber for discussions concerning the relationship between Irish and British culture, poetry and gender, and revision and rebellion. The text reshapes the poetic and critical field, exploring canonical and non-canonical poems by male and female poets so as to challenge outmoded views of the thematic and formal limitations of the sonnet.

This book addresses the connection between political themes and literary form in the most recent Argentine poetry. Ben Bollig uses the concepts of "lyric" and "state" as twin coordinates for both an assessment of how Argentinian poets have conceived a political role for their work and how poems come to speak to us about politics. Drawing on concepts from contemporary literary theory, this striking study combines textual analysis with historical research to shed light on the ways in which new modes of circulation help to shape poetry today.

Matthew Rowlinson proposes a revitalized and properly analytic formalism as the appropriate model for a reading of Tennyson. In a series of attentive close readings, he probes the nature of place and the structuring of desire in Tennyson's work. Focusing on the poet's most important early writings - fragments and poems produced between 1824 and 1833 - Rowlinson conflates deconstructive theory with psychoanalytic insights. The author begins by observing that the subjectivities articulated in these poems, from the strangely passive poet-seer of the ""Armageddon"" fragments to the embowered singers of ""Mariana,"" ""The Lady of Shalott,"" and ""The Hesperides"" to the absconding monarch of ""Ulysses,"" are all constituted in relation to ruined, abandoned, or inaccessible places. The placing of the subject allegorizes its relation to the signifier as well as to the discursive structures within which the signifier comes into being. On this premise, Rowlinson takes up Lacan's claim that it is through the signifier that it is through the signifier that all human desire is mediated. In the placement of the subjects he reads a distinctively Tennysonian articulation of desire. Following Paul de Man, Rowlinson demonstrates that allegory comes into being only with a structure of repetition. He has developed a formalist poetics that provides a psychoanalytic account of the most basic figurative and formal devices - allegory, metaphor, rhyme, and metre - and he offers an explication and critique of major concepts in Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalytic theory, including the gaze, the castration complex, the death drive, and the compulsion to repeat. By returning to the deconstruction, the author has resumed the challenges English studies took up in the 1970s and left incomplete in its rush to historicism. His readings offer fresh insights at the level of theory.

Building on the formula of York Notes, this Advanced series introduces students to more sophisticated analysis and wider critical perspectives. The notes enable students to appreciate contrasting interpretations of the text and to develop their own critical thinking. Key features include: study methods; an introduction to the text; summaries with critical notes; themes and techniques; textual analysis of key passages; author biography; historical and literary background; modern and historical critical approaches; chronology; and glossary of literary terms.

This book examines the development of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's intellectual legacy in Britain and America from 1834 to 1934 by focusing on his late role as the Sage of Highgate and his programme of educating young minds who were destined for the higher professions (particularly preaching and teaching). Chapters assess his pedagogy and his late publications, his posthumous reputation, and his influence on aesthetics, theology, philosophy, politics and social reform. The book discusses a wide range of British and American intellectuals, including Thomas and Matthew Arnold, F. D. Maurice, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, Shadworth Hodgson, T. H. Green, James Marsh, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Bushnell, William James and John Dewey. It demonstrates how Coleridgean ideas were developed and distorted into something he would never have recognized as his own and emphasizes his significance as a catalyst who played a vital role in shaping the intellectual vocation of the long nineteenth century.

This study should be of interest to the scholar and aficionado alike. It uncovers a thematic unity within Blake's early work: his far reaching use of humour. Although often dismissed as a product of his eccentricity, the author argues the comic was an essential key to Blake's concept of Vision. With special reference to Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, this book offers new readings of many of Blake's works, demonstrating how he was influenced by contemporary theatre, verbal and visual satirists and the Shakespearean clown.

This is the first critical edition of the twelfth-century Latin epic poem, Historia Vie Hierosolimitane, in an authoritative Oxford Medieval Texts edition, with facing-page text and translation and detailed introduction and notes.

Examining poetry by Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, and Amiri Baraka, among others, this book shows that leading US poets since 1979 have performed the role of public intellectual through their poetic rhetoric. Gwiazda's argument aims to revitalize the role of poetry and its social value within an era of global politics.

This first general bibliography on contemporary Spanish American poets focuses on writers born between 1910 and 1952. Three generations are represented: The first, poets born 1910-1925 and including such notable figures as Octavio Paz, Jose Lezama Lima, Nicanor Parra, Gonzalo Rojas, Olga Orozco, and Alvaro Mutis, may be said to concentrate on language. The second generation, poets born 1925-1939 whose work was consolidated in the 1960s, with many exceptions are concerned with politics and history. Representative figures include Ernesto Cardenal, Roque Dalton, Juan Gelman, and Jose Emilio Pacheco. Poets of the latest generation may perhaps be characterized by awareness of the poetic sign. Though less well known, their inclusion allows the reader to incorporate the poetry of the 1980, and early 1990s into the panorama of Spanish American literature. Providing both primary and secondary sources, this comprehensive reference work will serve scholars and students as the point of departure for research on contemporary Spanish American poetry on any of the eighty-six poets included. For each poet, the listing of original writings comprises (a) poetic works, (b) compilations and anthologies, and (c) other works, such as fiction and essays; the secondary listing consists of bibliographies and critical studies. A bibliography of general works follows and complements the listings for individual poets. It includes a general section and studies organized by countries. The poets also are entered by date of birth in a chronology along with their nationalities. An index of critics completes the work.

Faced with the chaos and banality of modern, everyday life, a number of Victorian poets sought innovative ways of writing about the unpoetic present in their verse. Their varied efforts are recognisably akin, not least in their development of mixed verse-forms that fused novel and epic to create something equal to the miscellaneousness of the age.

By comparing and contrasting the pre-conversion and the post-conversion poetics and poetic practices of T.S. Eliot, this book elucidates the responsibilities and opportunities for a poet who is also Christian. This book is the second in a trilogy which includes T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word.

Homer's poetry is widely recognized as the beginning of the literary tradition of the West and among its most influential canonical texts. Outlining a series of key themes, ideas, and values associated with Homer and Homeric poetry, Homer: A Guide for the Perplexed explores the question of the formation of the Iliad and the Odyssey - the so-called 'Homeric Problem'. Among the main Homeric themes which the book considers are origin and form, orality and composition, heroic values, social structure, and social bias, gender roles and gendered interpretation, ethnicity, representations of religion, mortality, and the divine, memory, poetry, and poetics, and canonicity and tradition, and the history of Homeric receptions. Drawing upon his extensive knowledge of scholarship on Homer and early epic, Ahuvia Kahane explores contemporary critical and philosophical questions relating to Homer and the Homeric tradition, and examines his wider cultural impact, contexts and significance. This is the ideal companion to study of this most influential poet, providing readers with some basic suggestions for further pursuing their interests in Homer.

By 1850, Alfred Tennyson was not merely the Poet Laureate, a commercially successful and critically acclaimed author, he was one of Britain's leading celebrities. Offering new analysis of the workings of Victorian celebrity, this volume explores the ever-expanding compass of Tennyson's fame and the efforts of the poet and others to control this phenomenon. It shows that Tennyson's retreat from mainland publicity to the secluded Isle of Wight and his limiting of his social circle to that of family and like-minded guests, only increased the demand of fans and tourists for access to the poet. Through an analysis of poetry, paintings, photography, illustrations, memoirs, reminiscences, diaries, letters, and newspaper and periodical articles, this book shows that Tennyson's fashioning of his reluctant celebrity affected not only his own life and works, but also had an effect on his celebrity and non-celebrity friends, and on the (self-)construction of his fans.

Taking a fresh look at the poetry and visual art of the Hellenistic age, from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. to the Romans' defeat of Cleopatra in 30 B.C., Graham Zanker makes enlightening discoveries about the assumptions and conventions of Hellenistic poets and artists and their audiences.
Zanker's exciting new interpretations closely compare poetry and art for the light each sheds on the other. He finds, for example, an exuberant expansion of subject matter in the Hellenistic periods in both literature and art, as styles and iconographic traditions reserved for grander concepts in earlier eras were applied to themes, motifs, and subjects that were emphatically less grand.