The Japanese Effect in Contemporary Irish Poetry provides a stimulating, original and lively analysis of the Irish-Japanese literary connection from the early 1960s to 2007. While for some this may partly remain Oscar Wilde's 'mode of style', this book will show that there is more of Japan in the work of contemporary Irish poets than 'a tinkling of china/ and tea into china.' Drawing on unpublished new sources, Irene De Angelis includes poets from a broad range of cultural backgrounds with richly varied styles: Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon, together with younger poets such as Sinead Morrissey and Joseph Woods. Including close readings of selected poems, this is an indispensable companion for all those interested in the broader historical and cultural research on the effect of oriental literature in modernist and postmodernist Irish poetry.

This book offers a major reassessment of John Clare's poetry and his position in the Romantic canon. Alert to Clare's knowledge of the work of his Romantic contemporaries and near contemporaries, it puts forward the first extended series of comparisons of Clare's poetry with texts we now think of as defining the period - in particular poems by Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and John Keats. It makes fully evident Clare's original contribution to the aesthetic culture of the age by analysing how he explores a wide range of concerns and preoccupations which are central to, and especially privileged in, Romantic-period poetics, including 'fancy', the sublime, childhood, ruins, joy, 'poesy', and a love lyric marked by a peculiar self-consciousness about sincere expression. At the heart of this book is the claim that the hitherto under-scrutinised subjective stances, transcendent modes, and abstract qualities of Clare's lyric poetry situate him firmly within, and as fundamentally part of, Romanticism, at the same time as his writing constitutes a distinctive contribution to one of the most fascinating eras of English literature.

A bold work of synthetic scholarship, Writing Australian Unsettlement argues that the history of Australian literature contains the rough beginnings of a new literacy. Michael Farrell reads songs, letters and visual poems by Indigenous farmers and stockmen, the unpunctuated journals of early settler women, drover tree-messages and carved clubs, and a meta-commentary on settlement from Moore River (the place escaped from in The Rabbit-Proof Fence) in order to rethink old forms. The book borrows the figure of the assemblage to suggest the active and revisable nature of Australian writing, arguing against the "settling" effects of its prior editors, anthologists, and historians. Avoiding the advancement of a new canon, Farrell offers instead an unsettled space in which to rethink Australian writing.

Often thought of as the quintessential poet of New England, Robert Frost is one of the most widely read American poets of the 20th century. He was a master of poetic form and imagery, his works seemed to capture the spirit of America, and he became so emblematic of his country that he read his work at President Kennedy's inauguration and traveled to Israel, Greece, and the Soviet Union as an emissary of the U.S. State Department. While many readers think of him as the personification of New England, he was born in San Francisco, published his first book of poetry in England, matured as a poet while abroad, taught for several years at the University of Michigan, and spent many of his winters in Florida. This reference helps illuminate the hidden complexities of his life and work.

Included in this volume are hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries on Frost's life and writings. Each of his collected poems is treated in a separate entry, and the book additionally includes entries on such topics as his public speeches, various colleges and universities with which he was associated, the honors that he won, his biographers, films about him, poets, and others whom he knew, and similar items. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and closes with a brief bibliography. The volume also provides a chronology and concludes with a general bibliography of major studies.

Seventeenth-century authors so thoroughly imbued the language and imagery of the Bible in vernacular translation that their texts are to be read as attempts to inscribe themselves within the realm of the sacred. This book analyzes how three seventeenth-century English authors fashion themselves as a specific biblical figure, and how they fashion themselves in their works in order to bring their spiritual lives in line with the narrative arch of a biblical type.

This book lays bare the sexy Blake lately obscured in fogs of political correctness and post-feminism. Its contributors uncover, in fact, numerous sexy Blakes, arguing for both chastity and pornography, violence and domination as well as desire and redemption, and also journeying in the realms of conceptual sex and conceptual art. Fierce tussles over the body in, and the body of, Blake's work are the book's life-blood. Contributors differ passionately in their conclusions about the nature of Blake's sexiness. All acknowledge Christopher Hobson's revelation of Blake's insistent tendency to normalize perversity - some with relish, some with alarm. We celebrate the mysteries of Blakean attractions and repulsions, and hope this volume will re-animate the lively sexual debates which once characterized Blake Studies.

Following the Formula in Beowulf, OErvar-Odds saga, and Tolkien proposes that Beowulf was composed according to a formula. Michael Fox imagines the process that generated the poem and provides a model for reading it, extending this model to investigate formula in a half-line, a fitt, a digression, and a story-pattern or folktale, including the Old-Norse Icelandic OErvar-Odds saga. Fox also explores how J. R. R. Tolkien used the same formula to write Sellic Spell and The Hobbit. This investigation uncovers relationships between oral and literate composition, between mechanistic composition and author, and between listening and reading audiences, arguing for a contemporary relevance for Beowulf in thinking about the creative process.

Modernist debates about waste - both aesthetic and economic - often express biases against gender and sexual errancy. The Poetics of Waste looks at writers and artists who resist this ideology and respond by developing an excessive poetics.

Ranging from soldiers reading newspapers at the front to authors' responses to the war, this book sheds new light on the reading habits and preferences of men and women, combatants and civilians, during the First World War. This is the first study of the conflict from the perspective of readers.

Consisting of six essayistic chapters, this book centers on two seminal yet not often associated Irish texts: Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1916). Practicing a comparative way of reading indebted to T.S. Eliot, Atkins traces the patterns of response the protagonists of these works show in leaving home and separating themselves from family and friends. Both Lemuel Gulliver and Stephen Dedalus flee from the messy burdens of ordinary life, seeking a transcendent existence, which Gulliver finds in the Flying or Floating Island, Laputa, whereas Stephen in art. Atkins also shows how Swift and Joyce both stand opposed to their characters, joined in the understanding that an ordinary life and an extra-ordinary one are often inseparable. Thus, Gulliver's Travels and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man can appear as essential critiques of modern misunderstandings.

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) was hailed by many in his day as America's foremost poet, outranking T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Ezra Pound. Perhaps best known for his sonnets, he startles readers into attention and response through deliberate obscurity and ambiguity and demanding syntax. Many of Robinson's works continue to be published today, introducing him to new generations of readers. This comprehensive encyclopedia provides information on Robinson's poems--he published more than 200--and also his less well-known prose works, along with entries on his family, friends, and professional associates. For entries on his writings, the year published, summaries of the works, background information, and critical commentary illuminating enigmatic passages are provided. For people, the entries provide biographical information and describe the influence the person had on Robinson's life.

The complete poems of Leopold Sedar Senghor, possibly Africa's most famous poet, are offered in translation for the first time in this bilingual edition. The book, representing the culmination of a lifetime of work, includes ""Lost Poems"", a collection of Senghor's earliest work. Senghor's poetry contrasts the lushness and wonder of Africa's past with the alienation and loss associated with assimilation into European culture. Co-founder of the negritude literary movement, Senghor is concerned that ways be provided for African and European cultures to enrich each other while preserving their own cultural identities. His poetry, alive with sensual imagery, reclaims his ancestral heritage and celebrates African culture. He writes with an awareness of his readers, preparing them to receive his culture and its values. With emotional power, he draws the reader deep into his world. In his introduction, translator Melvin Dixon places Senghor's writing in a historical perspective by relating it to his political inolvement. Dixon also elaborates on the ways in which the poems chronicle Senghor's own development as an intellectual, particularly on his struggles with issues of self and cultural identity. Dixon's translation preserves the integrity of Senghor's work by retaining, in the original, words and expressions unique to Senghor's African French, expressions whose meaning would be compromised in translation.

This is the first book on Irish literature to focus on the theme of loss, and how it is represented in Irish writing. It focuses on how literature is ideally suited to expressions and understanding of the nature of loss, given its ability to access and express emotions, sensations, feelings, and the visceral and haptic areas of experience. Dealing with feelings and with sensations, poems, novels and drama can allow for cathartic expressions of these emotions, as well as for a fuller understanding of what is involved in loss across all situations. The main notion of loss being dealt with is that of death, but feelings of loss in the wake of immigration and of the loss of certainties that defined notions of identity are also analysed. This volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers in Irish Studies, loss, memory, trauma, death, and cultural studies.

Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space explores why houses, in some ways the most private of spaces, have taken up such visibly public positions in the work of a range of prominent poets from Northern Ireland, examining the work of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Medbh McGuckian.

The first book in a decade from a poet whose blank verse speaks "with the precise qualifications of Henry James, and conveys the muted but implicit drama of Edward Hopper"--Anthony Hecht.. In this, his first collection since the acclaimed Little Voices of the Pears , Herbert Morris gathers fifteen recent poems in his two signature modes, the dramatic monologue and the meditative reverie. His subjects include a resplendent apricot gown once worn by Lillian Gish ("Chaplin enthralled, Griffith smitten, ecstatic"); a poignant human detail in Caravaggio's The Sacrifice of Isaac ; and a host of variations on the Peaceable Kingdom , the obsessive lifework of the painter Edward Hicks. Mr. Morris's blank verse, for decades now a glory of American poetry, here achieves a new level of mastery.

The intention of this book is to acquaint readers with the first rate translations of North American Indian poems produced during the past hundred years. These compositions are not only valuable as poetry, but also serve to reveal the mental and emotional capabilities of the Indians. They are in their own right, a significant but relatively unknown part of American literature.

Religious poetry has often been regarded as minor poetry and dismissed in large part because poetry is taken to require direct experience; whereas religious poetry is taken to be based on faith, that is, on second or third hand experience. The best methods of thinking about "experience" are given to us by phenomenology. Poetry and Revelation is the first study of religious poetry through a phenomenological lens, one that works with the distinction between manifestation (in which everything is made manifest) and revelation (in which the mystery is re-veiled as well as revealed). Providing a phenomenological investigation of a wide range of "religious poems", some medieval, some modern; some written in English, others written in European languages; some from America, some from Britain, and some from Australia, Kevin Hart provides a unique new way of thinking about religious poetry and the nature of revelation itself.

This book traces the development of hypermetric verse in Old English and compares it to the cognate traditions of Old Norse and Old Saxon. The study illustrates the inherent flexibility of the hypermetric line and shows how poets were able to manipulate this flexibility in different contexts for different practical and rhetorical purposes. This mode of analysis is therefore able to show what degree of control the poets had over the traditional alliterative line, what effects they were able to produce with various stylistic choices, and how attention to poetic style can aid in literary analysis.

Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in June 2016, and seldom in recent years has it been more richly deserved. That a song writer's lyrics should be regarded as literature was an idea at which many were surprised. Others have felt that to isolate the lyrics of a song from its musical context is unreal. Ultimately that is true: a song is an indefeasible whole, an inseparable marriage of words and music which achieves its overall emotional effect by that symbiosis and not otherwise. Yet it can also be said that the two components can be separately considered as two elements in the artist's creative utterance, and discussed as such. The evidence of Dylan's manuscripts supports the view that in writing his lyrics his way of going about things is not always widely different from that of a poet. Bob Dylan commented on the Nobel Prize in Literature which was awarded to him "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition": "When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was." Voice Without Restraint, refers to and is from the song "I dreamed I saw St Augustine" on John Wesley Harding, and is a phrase chosen to evoke the full-blooded commitment to his artistic utterance which is the hallmark of Bob Dylan's voice - in all senses.

R.S. Thomas's presentation of God has given rise to controversy and dissent. Exploring Thomas's techniques of creating his images of God, Elaine Shepherd addresses the problems surrounding the language of religion and of religious poetry. Refusing to limit herself to conventionally religious poems, and drawing on material from the earliest work to Counterpoint and beyond, she identifies the challenges with which Thomas confronts his readers. The sequence of close readings engages the reader in an exploration of language and image: from the image of woman as constructed by the Impressionist to the non-image of the mystical theologian.

Questions of genres as well as their possible definitions, taxonomies, and functions have been discussed since antiquity. Even though categories of genre today are far from being fixed, they have for decades been upheld without question. The goal of this volume is to problematize traditional definitions of poetic genres and to situate them in a broader socio-cultural, historical, and theoretical context. The contributions encompass numerous methodological approaches (including hermeneutics, poststructuralism, reception theory, cultural studies, gender studies), periods (Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism), genres (elegy, sonnet, visual poetry, performance poetry, hip hop) as well as languages and national literatures. From this interdisciplinary and multi-methodological perspective, genres, periods, languages, and literatures are put into fruitful dialogue, new perspectives are discovered, and suggestions for further research are provided.

From British attempts on the stage and page to reinvent the world order with their island at the center to the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher's museum that strove to make the invisible visible, the early modern period was rife with attempts to reimagine the world and the human place within it. This volume looks at natural philosophers, playwrights, historians, and other figures in the period 1500-1700 as a means of accessing the plethora of world models that circulated in Europe during this era. Contributors to this volume ask what motivated institutions and individuals to engage in world-building, examining its cultural utility and the reception these new worlds received. Close textual and visual analysis provide the foundation for the book, and the array of sources illustrates the rich tapestry of ideas, anxieties, and enthusiasms that served as the basis for world-building. Only through investigating imagined worlds as closely as scholars have examined "real" Renaissance landscapes can we hope to understand the intellectual and cultural reassessments that characterized this period, and the critical importance of imagination and belief in its intellectual landscape.

This book asserts that Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900) was a major precursor of W.B. Yeats (1865 - 1939), and shows how Wilde's image and intellect set in train a powerful influence within Yeats's creative imagination that remained active throughout the poet's life. The intellectual concepts, metaphysical speculations and artistic symbols and images which Yeats appropriated from Wilde changed the poet's perspective and informed the imaginative system of beliefs that Yeats formulated as the basis of his dramatic and poetic work. Section One, 'Influence and Identity' (1888 - 1895), explores the personal relationship of these two writers, their nationality and historical context as factors in influence. Section Two, 'Mask and Image' (1888 - 1917), traces the creative process leading to Yeats's construction of the antithetical mask, and his ideas on image, in relation to the role of Wilde as his precursor. Finally, 'Salome: Symbolism, Dance and Theories of Being' (1891 - 1939) concentrates on the immense influence that Wilde's symbolist play, Salome, wrought on Yeats's imaginative work and creative sensibility.

Mina Loy is recognised today as one of the most innovative modernist poets, numbering Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, Djuna Barnes and T.S. Eliot amongst her admirers. Drawing on substantial new archival research, this book challenges the existing critical myth of Loy as a 'modern woman' through an analysis of her unpublished autobiographical prose. Mina Loy's Autobiographies explores this major twentieth century writer's ideas about the 'modern' and how they apply to the 'modernist' writer-based on her engagement with twentieth-century avant-garde aesthetics-and charts how Loy herself uniquely defined modernity in her essays on literature and art. Sandeep Parmar here shows how, ultimately, Loy's autobiographies extend the modernist project by rejecting earlier impressions of avant-garde futurity and newness in favour of a 'late modernist' aesthetic, one that is more pessimistic, inward and interested in the fragmentary interplay between the past and present.