Jimi Hendrix, Princess Diana and Syria's Asma Al-Assad rub shoulders with Auden, Eliot and Shelley - and with the Trouser Thief Clive met during ten long weeks locked up in a closed psychiatric ward - in this offbeat and affectionate poetic biography. Since 2010, when Clive was told he had three separate life-threatening conditions, he has poured out a stream of fine poems - sometimes light, witty and paradoxical, sometimes sad, heartfelt and regretful. Some, like `Japanese Maple', an instant Internet sensation, have already made it into the anthologies. Others, like his book-length epic, The River in the Sky, are more demanding. All are packed with the unexpected ideas, inventive imagery and breathtaking wordplay that have helped him achieve his avowed ambition of becoming `a fairly major minor poet'.

This volume is a collection of essays that explains how literature, philosophy and theology have explored the role of wonder in our lives, particularly through poetry. Wonder has been an object of fascination for these disciplines from the Greek antiquity onwards, yet the connections between their views on the subject are often ignored in subject specific studies. The book is divided into three parts: Part I opens the conversation on wonder in philosophy, Part II is given to theology and Part III to literary perspectives. An international set of contributors, including poets as well as scholars, have produced a study that looks beyond traditional chronological, geographical and disciplinary boundaries, both within the individual essays themselves and in respect to one another. The volume's wide historical framework is punctuated by four poems by contemporary poets on the theme of wonder. An unconventional foray into one of the best-known themes of the European tradition, this book will be of great interest to scholars of literature, theology and philosophy.

T. S. Eliot's lifelong quest for a world of the spirit is the theme of this book by leading Eliot scholar A. David Moody. The first four essays in the collection map Eliot's spiritual geography: the American taproot of his poetry, his profound engagement with the philosophy and religion of India, his near and yet detached relations with England, and his problematic cultivation of a European mind. At the centre of the collection is a study of the Latin poem Pervigilium Veneris, a fragment of which figures enigmatically in the concluding lines of The Waste Land. The third part of the collection is a set of five investigations of Eliot's poems, dealing particularly with The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets, and attending to how they express and shape what he called 'the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being'.

First published in 1947, Poetry and the People presents a survey of English poetry from the earliest times till 1940s, viewed from an unusual angle. It is the author's thesis that English Poetry is unpopular, in the sense that it is not loved by the people, because the sources of its inspiration, which were originally drawn from the soil, were diverted during the Renaissance into aristocratic and academic channels. Nevertheless, the emerging traditions, though driven underground, survived in the work of such men as Burns, Hogg and Clare and in folk song. This book is a must read for scholars and researchers of English poetry and English literature.

Recent research into a self-taught tradition of English rural poetry has begun to offer a radically new dimension to our view of the role of poetry in the literary culture of the eighteenth century. In this important new study John Goodridge offers a detailed reading of key rural poems of the period, examines the ways in which eighteenth-century poets adapted Virgilian Georgic models, and reveals an illuminating link between rural poetry and agricultural and folkloric developments. Goodridge compares poetic accounts of rural labour by James Thomson, Stephen Duck, and Mary Collier, and makes a close analysis of one of the largely forgotten didactic epics of the eighteenth century, John Dyer's The Fleece. Through an exploration of the purpose of rural poetry and how it relates to the real world, Goodridge breaks through the often brittle surface of eighteenth-century poetry, to show how it reflects the ideologies and realities of contemporary life.

Criticism of Eliot has ignored the public dimension of his life and work. His poetry is often seen as the private record of an internal spiritual struggle. Professor Cooper shows how Eliot deliberately addressed a North Atlantic 'mandarinate' fearful of social disintegration during the politically turbulent 1930s. Almost immediately following publication, Four Quartets was accorded canonical status as a work that promised a personal harmony divorced from the painful disharmonies of the emerging postwar world. Cooper connects Eliot's careers as banker, director and editor to a much wider cultural agenda. He aimed to reinforce established social structures during a period of painful political transition. This powerful and original study re-establishes the public context in which Eliot's work was received and understood. It will become an essential reference work for all interested in a wider understanding of Eliot and of Anglo-American cultural relations.

Examination of the links between science and literary history is providing new insight for scholars across a range of disciplines. In Wordsworth and the Geologists, first published in 1995, John Wyatt explores the relationship between a major Romantic poet and a group of scientists in the formative years of a new discipline, geology. Wordsworth's later poems and prose display unexpected knowledge of contemporary geology and a preoccupation with many of the philosophical issues concerned with the developing science of geology. Letters and diaries of a group of leading geologists reveal that they knew Wordsworth, and discussed their subject with him. Wyatt shows how the implications of such discussions challenge the simplistic version of 'two cultures', the Romantic-literary against the scientific-materialistic; and he reminds us of the variety of interrelating discourses current between 1807 (the year of the foundation of the Geological Society of London) and 1850 (the year of Wordsworth's death).

The presentation of poetry to auditor and reader involves a complex interaction of rhetorical, orthographical and visual mediating skills. At issue are the nature of 'authority', the creation of a readership attuned to the writer's poetic resonances, and a delicate negotiation between literary tradition and individual talent. In a series of detailed readings leading scholars focus on the presentation of work by Spenser, Herbert, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Smart, Blake, Wordsworth, Browning, Newman, Yeats, Lawrence and David Jones. The wide chronological range enables unusually extensive comparison across the boundaries of generic form, and between the varying emotional, aesthetic and rhetorical emphases of specific periods: from the creation of fictitious personae to the construction of autobiographical 'self', from the interaction of printed word and visual image to the arrangements and rearrangements of structure and sequence.

Traditionally, critics of the English Renaissance have viewed pastoral as a static, idealizing genre, aimed at the recreation of an idyllic past. More recently, these idealizing humanist approaches have been forcefully challenged by studies written from historicist perspectives. In Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction, first published in 1995, Judith Haber complicates the conventional opposition between humanist and historicist criticism by examining the ways in which pastoral poets themselves interrogate the contradictory relations inherent in their genre. Haber explores problems of representation, self-representation, and imitation in classical and Renaissance pastoral, focusing on texts by Theocritus, Virgil, Sidney and Marvell. Her approach revises current understanding of pastoral as a genre, and raises wider questions about the place of literature in society and the difficulties involved in constituting literary traditions.

This book seeks to rewrite assumptions about the Augustan era through an exploration of Jacobite ideology. The author studies canonical and noncanonical literature and uncovers a new "four nations" literary history defined in terms of a struggle for control of the language of authority between Jacobite and Hanoverian writers. Sources explored include ballads in Scots, Irish, Welsh and Gaelic. The author concludes that the literary history of the Augustan age is built on the history of the victors in the Revolution of 1688.

Christina Rossetti's Environmental Consciousness takes a cognitive ecocritical approach to Rossetti's writing as it developed throughout her career. This study provides a unique understanding of Rossetti's identity as an artist through a cognitive model while also engaging significantly with her spiritual relationship to the nonhuman world. Rossetti was a deliberate and conscious creator who used her writing for therapeutic purposes to create, contemplate, maintain, verify, and, revise her identity. Her understanding of her autobiographical self and her place in the world often comes through observations and poetic treatments of the nonhuman. Rossetti, her speakers, and her characters seek spiritual knowledge in the natural world and share this knowledge with an audience. In nature, Rossetti finds evidence for and guidance from a loving God who offers salvation. Her work places a high value on nature from a Christian perspective that puts conservation over renunciation. She frequently uses strategies that have now been identified by Christian environmentalist such as retrieval, ecojustice, stewardship, and ecological spirituality. With new readings of popular works like "Goblin Market" and "A Birthday," along with treatments of largely neglected works like Verses (1847) and Rossetti's devotional writings, Christina Rossetti's Environmental Consciousness offers an understanding of Rossetti's processes and purposes as a writer and displays new potential for her work in the face of twenty-first-century environmental issues.

Originally published in 1965, A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an interpretation of the most important poem in Middle English literature, the only fourteenth century work which can stand beside Chaucer. The book examines the poem's conventions and purposes in a critical analysis and provides a useful and insightful introduction to 'Sir Gawain'. It will be of interest to students and academics studying the poem of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Andrew Bennett's original study of Keats focuses on questions of narrative and audience as a means to offer new readings of the major poems. It discusses ways in which reading is 'figured' in Keats's poetry, and suggests that such 'figures of reading' have themselves determined certain modes of response to Keats's texts. Together with important new readings of Keats's poetry, the study presents a significant rethinking of the relationship between Romantic poetry and its audience. Developing recent discussions in literary theory concerning narrative, readers and reading, the nature of the audience for poetry, and the Romantic 'invention' of posterity, Bennett elaborates a sophisticated and historically specific reconceptualization of Romantic writing.

Originally published in 1990, the main purpose of this anthology is to present the vernacular secular lyric of the Middle Ages, although it also includes Latin literature of the Middle Ages and the influence of the hymn.

Dryden defined himself as a writer in relation to other writers, and in doing so was something of a pioneer professional man of letters. This book looks at Dryden's literary relationships with Ben Jonson and with French authors (notably Corneille); at issues raised by the work thought to be his greatest by Romantic and contemporary readers, Fables Ancient and Modern; and at Samuel Johnson's Life of Dryden. This book has implications for questions of literary reception, influence and intertextuality, as well as for the reputation and context of Dryden himself.

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

While love is private, and in medieval literature especially is seen as demanding secrecy, to tell stories about it is to make it public. Looking, often accompanied by listening, is the means by which love is brought into the public realm and by which legal evidence of adulterous love can be obtained. Medieval romances contain many scenes in which secret watchers and listeners play leading roles, and in which the problematic relation of sight to truth is a central theme. The effect of such scenes is to place the poem's audience as secret watchers and listeners; and in later medieval narratives, as the role of the storyteller comes to be realized, the poet too sees himself in the undignified role of a voyeur. A. C. Spearing's book explores these and related themes, first in relation to medieval and modern theories and instances of looking, and then through a series of readings of romances and first-person narratives, including works by Beroul, Gottfried von Strassburg, Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, Chaucer, Lydgate, Douglas, Dunbar, and Skelton. Its focus on looking also leads to the recovery of some less well-known works such as Partonope of Blois and The Squire of Low Degree. The general approach is psychoanalytic, but the reading of specific medieval texts always has primacy, and this in turn makes possible a running critique of current conceptions of the gaze in relation to power and gender.

Renaissance humanism takes as one of its subjects for inquiry the category of the human itself. As Intricate Movements: Experimental Thinking and Human Analogies in Sidney and Spenser shows, late sixteenth-century English poets found some remarkably radical ways to interrogate and redefine the status of humans. The recent vogue for posthumanist theory encourages a view of non-human objects and animals in Renaissance literature as pathways to essentially anti-humanist thought. On the contrary, this book argues that Sidney, Spenser, and their contemporaries employ animals, earth, buildings, and fictions as analogies employed toward a better understanding of what makes humans a special category, both ontologically and ethically. Horses and riders are studied by Sidney as a way to understand readers and writers; the 1580 Dover Straits Earthquake provides Spenser and Gabriel Harvey an opportunity to explore human emotion; liturgical spaces are represented by Sidney and Spenser in order to reassess human community; and fictional persons are interrogated by Spenser as models for human interpersonal epistemology. This volume seeks to return critical assessments of the period's engagement with the non-human back to human concerns. Focusing on several early modern analogies between human and non-human entities, Intricate Movements argues Sidney's and Spenser's thinking about the human is both radically experimental and, ultimately, humane.

The poetry emanating from the bhakti tradition of devotional love in India has been both a religious expression and a form of resistance to hierarchies of caste, gender, and colonialism. Some scholars have read this art form through the lens of resistance and reform, but others have responded that imposing an interpretive framework on these poems fails to appreciate their authentic expressions of devotion. This book argues that these declarations of love and piety can simultaneously represent efforts towards emancipation at the spiritual, political, and social level. This book, through a close study of Nalini (1911), a Malayalam lyric poem, as well as other poems, authored by Mahakavi Kumaran Asan (1873-1924), a low-caste Kerala poet, demonstrates how Asan employed a theme of love among humans during the modern period in Kerala that was grounded in the native South Indian bhakti understanding of love of the deity. Asan believed that personal religious freedom comes from devotion to the deity, and that love for humans must emanate from love of the deity. In showing how devotional religious expression also served as a resistance movement, this study provides new perspective on an understudied area of the colonial period. Bringing to light an under-explored medium, in both religious and artistic terms, this book will be of great interest to scholars of religious studies, Hindu studies, and religion and literature, as well as academics with an interest in Indian culture.

Wordsworth's Reading 1770-1799 lists all of the authors and (where possible) books known to have been read by William Wordsworth from his childhood until his move to Dove Cottage in 1799 at the age of twenty-nine. This information is presented in an easy-to-use form - in alphabetical order by author - and includes dates of reading and full discussions of the evidence. It draws on analyses of Wordsworth's manuscripts contained in current or forthcoming scholarly editions of his works, and incorporates a great deal of original research into the poet's intellectual development, including studies of the libraries of John Wordsworth Sr. (the poet's father), Hawkshead Grammar School, Racedown Lodge, and the Bristol Library Society. Where possible, surviving copies of Wordsworth's books are examined and described. This is a most complete study of Wordsworth's reading, and will be an essential reference tool for all scholars and students of his work.

John Milton's poetry and prose are central to our understanding of the aesthetic, political and religious upheavals of early modern England. Innovative recent scholarship, however, continues to expand the range of contexts through which we read Milton beyond Christian Europe, unearthing the vitality and resonance of the Miltonic text within religious and political debates across borders, through time and in multiple languages. The Islamic world has begun to receive deserved recognition as one such global site of this cultural energy. The publication of complete translations of Paradise Lost into Arabic has stimulated fresh critical explorations from a multiplicity of perspectives: historicist, comparative and theological. Attention to spatially and religiously diverse influences and reception contexts offers new avenues of approach into masterpieces including Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Areopagitica, as well as into the cultural forces these texts represent, reimagine and contest. By exploring how Milton, Islam and the Middle East address and implicate one another, this collection asks how, why and where Milton matters. This book was originally published as a special issue of English Studies.

Ecocriticism and the Poiesis of Form: Holding on to Proteus demonstrates how a fractal imagination helps one hold the form of a poem within the reaches of Deep Time, and it explores the kinship between the hazy, liminal moment when Sound becomes Syllable and the hazy, liminal moment when the sage energy of the Atom made a leap toward the gaze of the first cell, to echo Merwin. Moe distills his methodology as follows: "My work?-I point," asserted the aphorism. "That's what I do." To point, the project integrates a wide range of interdisciplinary ideas-including biosemiotics, fractals, phi, trauma theory, the Mandelbrot Set, hyperobjects, meditative chants, Goethe's morphology, Ramanujan's summation, a spiderweb's sonic properties, and Thoreau's sense of the plant-like burgeoning force of an Atom-in order to open up multiple trajectories. In this context, the volume foregrounds the insights of poets/storytellers including Hillman, Snyder, Anzaldua, EEC, okpik, Whitman, Dickinson, Gladding, Melville, Morrison, and Toomer, for they are most attentive to that liminal moment when the vibratory hum in language, and in the cosmos, turns kinetic. As this volume draws on a wide range of writers from many backgrounds, it allows the myriad voices to engage with one another across differences in race, gender, and ethnicity. These writers show us how, to echo Dickinson, the "Freight / Of a delivered Syllable - " can split and how the energy unleashed came from, and points us back toward, the energy (un)making the forms of Gaia. The starting point for discussing the energy of a poem can no longer begin with the human; rather, Holding on explores how the poem's energy is but a sliver of a hyperobject "massively distributed" throughout the cosmos-a sage energy that brings forth form.

Milton and the New Scientific Age represents significant advantages over all previous volumes on the subject of Milton and science, as it includes contributions from top scholars and prominent beginners in a broad number of fields. Most of these fields have long dominated work in both Milton and seventeenth-century studies, but they have previously not included the relatively new and revolutionary topic of early modern chemistry, physiology, and medicine. Previously this subject was confined to the history of science, with little if any attention to its literary development, even though it prominently appears in John Milton's Paradise Lost, which also includes early "science fiction" speculations on aliens ignored by most readers. Both of these oversights are corrected in this essay collection, while more traditional areas of research have been updated. They include Milton's relationship both to Bacon and the later or Royal Society Baconians, his views on astronomy, and his "vitalist" views on biology and cosmology. In treating these topics, our contributors are not mired in speculations about whether or not Milton was on the cutting edge of early science or science fiction, for, as nearly all of them show, the idea of a "cutting edge" is deeply anachronistic at a time when most scientists and scientific enthusiasts held both fully modern and backward-looking beliefs. By treating these combinations contextually, Milton's literary contributions to the "new science" are significantly clarified along with his many contemporary sources, all of which merit study in their own right.