This major study offers a broad view of the writing and careers of eighteenth-century women poets, casting new light on the ways in which poetry was read and enjoyed, on changing poetic tastes in British culture, and on the development of many major poetic genres and traditions.

Rather than presenting a chronological survey, Paula R. Backscheider explores the forms in which women wrote and the uses to which they put those forms. Considering more than forty women in relation to canonical male writers of the same era, she concludes that women wrote in all of the genres that men did but often adapted, revised, and even created new poetic kinds from traditional forms.

Backscheider demonstrates that knowledge of these women's poetry is necessary for an accurate and nuanced literary history. Within chapters on important canonical and popular verse forms, she gives particular attention to such topics as women's use of religious poetry to express candid ideas about patriarchy and rape; the continuing evolution and important role of the supposedly antiquarian genre of the friendship poetry; same-sex desire in elegy by women as well as by men; and the status of Charlotte Smith as a key figure of the long eighteenth century, not only as a Romantic-era poet.

This is an original contribution to understanding of an important but overlooked aspect of modern poetry, offering a comparative approach to the topic.This collection of research explores the interaction of religious awareness and literary expression in English poetry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many different types of poetics may be seen to be at work in the period 1875 to 2005, along with various kinds of religious awareness and poetic expression. Religious experience has a crucial influence on literary language, and the latter is renewed by religious culture. The religious dimension has been a decisive factor of modern English poetic expression of the last hundred years or so.The religious and mystical dimension of poetry of the period is borne out by the focus on, among other things, grace and purgation, the tension between time and eternity, redemption and the demands of eschatology, immanence and transcendence, and conversion and martyrdom. The chapters also explore how church practice and ritual, architecture and liturgy, play into the poetry of the period. This volume offers a comprehensive discussion of this important but often overlooked aspect of modern English poetry.

The weather in Moscow is good, there's no cholera, there's also no lesbian love...Brrr Remembering those persons of whom you write me makes me nauseous as if I'd eaten a rotten sardine. Moscow doesn't have them--and that's marvellous."
--"Anton Chekhov," writing to his publisher in 1895

Chekhov's barbed comment suggests the climate in which Sophia Parnok was writing, and is an added testament to to the strength and confidence with which she pursued both her personal and artistic life. Author of five volumes of poetry, and lover of Marina Tsvetaeva, Sophia Parnok was the only openly lesbian voice in Russian poetry during the Silver Age of Russian letters. Despite her unique contribution to modern Russian lyricism however, Parnok's life and work have essentially been forgotten.

Parnok was not a political activist, and she had no engagement with the feminism vogueish in young Russian intellectual circles. From a young age, however, she deplored all forms of male posturing and condescension and felt alienated from what she called patriarchal virtues. Parnok's approach to her sexuality was equally forthright. Accepting lesbianism as her natural disposition, Parnok acknowledged her relationships with women, both sexual and non-sexual, to be the centre of her creative existence.

Diana Burgin's extensively researched life of Parnok is deliberately woven around the poet's own account, visible in her writings. The book is divided into seven chapters, which reflect seven natural divisions in Parnok's life. This lends Burgin's work a particular poetic resonance, owing to its structural affinity with one of Parnok's last and greatest poetic achievements, the cycle of love lyrics Ursa Major. Dedicated to her last lover, Parnok refers to this cycle as a seven-star of verses, after the seven stars that make up the constellation. Parnok's poems, translated here for the first time in English, added to a wealth of biographical material, make this book a fascinating and lyrical account of an important Russian poet. Burgin's work is essential reading for students of Russian literature, lesbian history and women's studies.

In this first scholarly work on India's great modern poet, Laetitia Zecchini outlines a story of literary modernism in India and discusses the traditions, figures and events that inspired and defined Arun Kolatkar. Based on an impressive range of archival and unpublished material, this book also aims at moving lines of accepted genealogies of modernism and 'postcolonial literature'. Zecchini uncovers how poets of Kolatkar's generation became modern Indian writers while tracing a lineage to medieval oral traditions. She considers how literary bilingualism allowed Kolatkar to blur the boundaries between Marathi and English, 'Indian' and 'Western sources; how he used his outsider position to privilege the quotidian and minor and revived the spirit of popular devotion. Graphic artist, poet and songwriter, storyteller of Bombay and world history, poet in Marathi, in English and in 'Americanese', non-committal and deeply political, Kolatkar made lines wobble and treasured impermanence. Steeped in world literature, in European avant-garde poetry, American pop and folk culture, in a 'little magazine' Bombay bohemia and a specific Marathi ethos, Kolatkar makes for a fascinating subject to explore and explain the story of modernism in India. This book has received support from the labex TransferS: http://transfers.ens.fr/

Apocalyptic nightmares that humanly-created intelligences will one day rise up against their creators haunt the western creative imagination. However, these narratives find their initial expression not in the widely disseminated Frankenstein story but in William Blake's early mythological works. This book looks at why we persistently fear our own creations by examining Blake's illuminated books of the 1790s through the lens of Kierkegaard's theories of personality and of anxiety. It offers a close examination of Kierkegaard's and Blake's similar, and to an extent shared, historical milieux as residents of Denmark's and England's political and economic centers. Each author's residence in a major urban center motivated them to develop a concept of innocence closely identified with the pastoral, and to place their respective and similar concepts of innocence within a larger developmental scheme encompassing an ethical and then a religious consciousness. Rovira identifies contemporary tensions between monarchy and democracy, science and religion, and nature and artifice as the source both of Kierkegaard's concept of anxiety and Blake's representation of creation anxiety in his early illuminated books.

What does it mean for a woman to write an elegy, ode, epic, or blazon in the seventeenth century? How does their reading affect women's use of particular poetic forms and what can the physical appearance of a poem, in print and manuscript, reveal about how that poem in turn was read? Forms of Engagement shows how the aesthetic qualities of early modern women's poetry emerge from the culture in which they write. It reveals previously unrecognized patterns of influence between women poets Katherine Philips, Lucy Hutchinson, and Margaret Cavendish and their peers and predecessors: how Lucy Hutchinson responded to Ben Jonson and John Milton, how Margaret Cavendish responded to Thomas Hobbes and the scientists of the early Royal Society, and how Katherine Philips re-worked Donne's lyrics and may herself have influenced Abraham Cowley and Andrew Marvell. This book places analysis of form at the centre of an historical study of women writers, arguing that reading for form is reading for influence. Hutchinson, Philips, and Cavendish were immersed in mid-seventeenth century cultural developments, from the birth of experimental philosophy, to the local and state politics of civil war and the rapid expansion of women's print publication. For women poets, reworking poetic forms such as elegy, ode, epic, and couplet was a fundamental engagement with the culture in which they wrote. By focusing on these interactions, rather than statements of exclusion and rejection, a formalist reading of these women can actually provide a more nuanced historical view of their participation in literary culture.

Siegfried Sassoon: Scorched Glory is the first survey of the poet's published work since his death and the first to draw on the edited diaries and letters. We learn how Sassoon's family background and Jewish inheritance, his troubled sexuality, his experience of war - in particular his public opposition to it - his relationship to the Georgian poets and other writers, and his eventual withdrawal to country life shaped his creativity. Sassoon's status as a war poet has overshadowed his wider achievements and the complex personality behind them. This critical evaluation of Sassoon's work is long overdue and will provide a valuable starting-point for future reappraisals of a writer for whom life and art were fused.

Addressed to all readers of poetry, this is a book about the poet's role throughout the last three centuries. The Modern Poet shows how many successive generations of poets across the English-speaking world have had to collaborate and to battle with the culture of the universities.

First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

The loss of a baby is perhaps the most tragic thing that can happen to a person; for some only the unique qualities of poetry can fully capture the expressions of grief. These poignant and sensitive poems, all by bereaved mothers and fathers, give consoling affirmations for anyone who has suffered a pregnancy loss or disappointment. Marion Cohen is a poet, writer, mathemetician, teacher, wife, and mother. She has had several books published and is a consulting editor for Mothering.

Volumes IV and V of the Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, which complete the edition, contain all of his dramatic writing in verse. Hardy was Hardy was interested in dramatic verse all his adult life; before he wrote his first novel he considered writing plays in blank verse, and during the thirty years of his novel-writing career he entered in his notebooks many schemes for a vast poetic drama of England's wars with Napoleon. But it was not until after he had turned from fiction to poetry, in the 1890s, that he actually began to work on a poetic drama. The Dynasts was written between 1902 and 1907; the Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall was began in 1916 and completed in 1923.
In addition to the two major dramas this volume includes Hardy's versions of two folk-pieces: the Mummers'Play of 'Saint George'and the rustic operetta O'Jan. O'Jan, O'Jan'(here published for the first time). Textual annotations, together with a full account of the rough draft of Part Third of The Dynasts, make it possible for the reader to follow the history of the composition of Hardy's epic drama in unusual detail. Explanatory notes to each of the dramatic works describe its composition and publication, and provide supporting material from Hardy's letters and notebooks. Appendices add further information on the production and performance of these works.

Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Robert Lowell has left a prodigious literary legacy that includes several verse plays as well as numerous volumes of poetry. His private papers and other unpublished materials provide an illuminating record of a distinguished career and cast light on personal and creative issues of interest to both readers and scholars. The Robert Lowell collection at the Houghton Library at Harvard University comprises some 2,916 items. These include family and literary correspondence, poetic notebooks, and manuscripts covering a period of more than thirty-five years. This annotated guide to the collection is the product of detailed study of Lowell's work, both published and unpublished, and benefits from the poet's own review of some of the papers. Researchers will appreciate the index to the poems, which offers a key to the various drafts of each work. This book will be of interest to all Lowell scholars and to students of twentieth-century American poetry.

This book is the first collection of essays dedicated to the work of C. H. Sisson (1915-2003), a major English poet, critic and translator. The collection aims to offer an overall guide to his work for new readers, while also encouraging established readers of one aspect (such as his well-known classical translations) to explore others. It champions in particular the quality of his original poetry. The book brings together contributions from scholars and critics working in a wide range of fields, including classical reception, translation studies and early modern literature as well as modern English poetry, and concludes with a more personal essay on Sisson's work by Michael Schmidt, his publisher.

This book provides a new context for understanding Wordsworth's major poetry by examining the poet's response to Enlightenment attitudes toward nature and society. Alan Bewell argues that at the core of Wordsworth's poetry is an anthropological vision, a concern with how human beings first made the transition from nature to society. In substantially new interpretations of the early Prelude and many of the shorter poems, Bewell suggest that Wordsworth's major objective as a poet was to write a history of the imagination, which would show the role it has played in human progress and the genesis of social institutions. The various fields comprised in Enlightenment anthropology provided Wordsworth with a model for how such a history might proceed. In eighteenth-century ethnography, geology, environmental theory, and biblical studies, in philosophical inquiries into the genesis of myths, the supernatural, and the idea of death, he found discursive models for talking about human origins. Moral philosophy also constituted a powerful discourse on marginal individuals, which underlies Wordsworth's interest in writing about outcasts and beggars, idiots and savages, the blind, the deaf, and the mute. Bewell argues that Wordsworth identified with and fashioned his self-understanding out of his observation of these individuals; the shift to autobiography in his later works was thus toward a complementary mode of anthropological inquiry.

The Ring and the Book, Browning's 21,000 line epic, is widely regarded as his masterpiece. This is the third, and final, volume of the Oxford edition covering this work, comprising the monologue of Johannes-Baptista Bottinius, and then the glowing conclusion to the work as a whole: the monologues of Pope Innocent XII and of Guido in his prison-cell prior to execution, and then the witty, ironic envoi of Book XII. The commentary in this edition contains a wealth of new contextual material that illuminates Browning's work in sometimes surprising ways. The copy text of 1888-9, the final edition of Browning's lifetime, has been scrupulously examined, both in relation to compositors' errors, and Browning's own final corrections to the text: eighty-nine emendations to accidentals, and nineteen emendations to substantives, produce a text as near as possible to Browning's final intentions. Appendix A presents previously unknown source material, concerning the 'cadaver synod' of 897, from Browning's father's historical notebooks. The Afterword gives a fresh view of the real history of the Franceschini murder case, based on new research in the archives in Arezzo.

This new edition of mythological poems from the Poetic Edda takes the reader deep into the imagination of the Viking poets (c.1000 AD). Text and translation are set side by side. The poetry is interpreted and its qualities discussed in full introductions and commentaries for each of the poems.

These essays from a distinguished, international group of scholars trace the process of thinking and creation in one of the great literary minds of the twentieth century. Archival and newly available materials reveal this canonical author's composition process and artistic virtuosity.

This book considers Baudelaire's prose poetry as an exploration of the duality of the genre. It considers the ironic and parodic aspects of the work and, in the light of Baudelaire's own theories of the comic, argues that his prose poetry is best understood as a form of literary caricature.

Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, is the most important Elizabethan woman writer and patron outside the royal family. By astute use of the genres permitted to women, she supported the Protestant cause, introduced continental literary genres, expanded opportunities for later women writers, and influenced seventeenth-century lyric and drama by such writers as John Donne, George Herbert, Mary Wroth, and William Shakespeare. This scholarly edition in two volumes is the first to include all her extant works: Volume I prints her three original poems, the disputed `Dolefull Lay of Clorinda', her translations from Petrarch, Mornay, and Garnier, and all her known letters. Volume II contains her metrical paraphrases of Psalms 44-150. The edition also provides a biographical introduction, discussion of her sources and methods of composition, textual annotation, and a detailed commentary.

Shahnama Studies III focuses on the hugely successful afterlife of the Shahnama or Book of Kings, completed by the poet Firdausi around 1010 AD. This long epic grew out to be an icon of Persian culture and served as a source of inspiration for art and literature, leaving its traces in manifold ways. The contributors to this volume each treat an aspect of the rich legacy of the Shahnama and offer new insights in Shahnama manuscript studies, the illustration of the Shahnama, the phenomenon of later epics, and the Shahnama in later texts and contexts.