This collection gives sustained attention to the literary dimensions of children's poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. While reasserting the importance of well-known voices, such as those of Isaac Watts, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, A. A. Milne, and Carol Ann Duffy, the contributors also reflect on the aesthetic significance of landmark works by less frequently celebrated figures such as Richard Johnson, Ann and Jane Taylor, Cecil Frances Alexander and Michael Rosen. Scholarly treatment of children's poetry has tended to focus on its publication history rather than to explore what comprises - and why we delight in - its idiosyncratic pleasures. And yet arguments about how and why poetic language might appeal to the child are embroiled in the history of children's poetry, whether in Isaac Watts emphasising the didactic efficacy of "like sounds," William Blake and the Taylor sisters revelling in the beauty of semantic ambiguity, or the authors of nonsense verse jettisoning sense to thrill their readers with the sheer music of poetry. Alive to the ways in which recent debates both echo and repudiate those conducted in earlier periods, The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry investigates the stylistic and formal means through which children's poetry, in theory and in practice, negotiates the complicated demands we have made of it through the ages.

In Renaissance England and Scotland, verse libel was no mere sub-division of verse satire but a fully-developed, widely-read poetic genre in its own right. This fact has been hidden from literary historians by the nature of the genre itself: defamation was rigorously prosecuted by state and local authorities throughout the period. Thus most (but not all) libelling, in verse or prose, was confined to manuscript circulation. This comprehensive survey of the genre identifies all sixteenth-century verse libel texts, printed and transcribed. It makes fifty-two of the least familiar of these poems accessible for further study by providing critical texts with glosses and explanatory notes. In reconstructing the contexts of these poems, we identify a number of the libellers, their targets, the circumstances of attack, and the workings of the scribal networks that disseminated many of them over wide areas, often for decades. The book's concentration on poems restricted to manuscript circulation throws substantial new light on the nature of Renaissance scribal culture. As poetic technicians, its practitioners were among the age's most experimental and creative. They produced some of the most popular, widely read works of their age and beyond, while their output established the foundation upon which the seventeenth-century tradition of verse libel developed organically.

A world of dew And within every dewdrop A world of struggle The iconic three-line haiku form is increasingly popular today as people embrace its simplicity and grace--and its connections to the Japanese ethos of mindfulness and minimalism. Say more with fewer words. This practical guide by poet and teacher Bruce Ross shows you how to capture a fleeting moment, like painting a picture with words, and how to give voice to your innermost thoughts, feelings, and observations. You don't have to be a practiced poet or writer to write your own haiku, and this book shows you how. In this book, aspiring poets will find: Accessible, easy-to-replicate examples and writing prompts A foreword that looks at the state of haiku today as the form continues to expand worldwide An introduction to related Japanese haiku forms such as tanka, haiga, renga, haibun, and senryu A listing of international journals and online resources Do you want to tell a story? Give haibun a try. Maybe you want to express a fleeting feeling? A tanka is the perfect vehicle. Are you more visual than verbal? Then a haiga, or illustrated haiku, is the ideal match. Finally, a renga is perfect as a group project or to create with friends, passing a poem around, adding line after line, and seeing what your group effort amounts to. Ross walks readers through the history and form of haiku, before laying out what sets each Japanese poetic form apart. Then it's time to turn to your notebook and start drafting some verse of your own!

Long overshadowed by fellow confessional poets Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton seldom features in literary criticism, despite being one of America's most influential women writers. Now in this much-needed volume Sexton and her poetry are reassessed for the first time in two decades. With new access to her archives, the scholars and poets featured here consider Sexton's wide range of literary production: how it shaped her creative process, informs readings of her work, and reveals her efforts to build a successful career without a university education. Notable in presenting Sexton the educator and public figure, This Business of Words also considers her relationships with peers and various media and interprets her strategies for teaching, critiquing poems, and delivering readings. As they revisit their initial encounters with Sexton as readers, writers, and teachers, the contributors to this volume map the influence of her craft on twenty-first-century culture.

Matthew Arnold was one of the nineteenth century's greatest spokesmen for the saving power of culture, especially of poetry, to substitute for a vanishing religion. Yet he was persistently troubled throughout his career by the difficulty of finding adequate authority in language. Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language explores Arnold's attempts to find an authoritative language, and argues that his occasional claims for such a language reveal more uneasiness than confidence in the value of ""letters."" It examines Arnold's poetry within this context and demonstrates that his various experiments - to speak in oracular voice, to use classic forms, to achieve a grand style - and their failures, reflect the inevitable difficulties facing any poet in an age of intellectual and cultural upheaval. Riede argues that Arnold's determined efforts to write with authority, combined with his deep-seated suspicion of his medium, result in an exciting if often agonized tension in his poetic language - a language that strains against its inevitable but generally unacknowledged limitations.

Written by internationally established scholars of Thomas Moore's music, poetry, and prose writing, Thomas Moore and Romantic Inspiration is a collection of twelve essays and a timely response to significant new biographical, historiographical and editorial work on Moore. This collection reflects the rich variety of cutting-edge work being done on this significant and prolific figure. Sarah McCleave and Brian Caraher have contributed an introduction that positions Moore in his own time (1800-1850), addresses subsequent neglect in the twentieth century, and contextualises the contemporary re-evaluation of Thomas Moore as a figure of considerable interdisciplinary artistic and cultural significance. The contributions to this collection establish Moore's importance in the fields of Neoclassical and Romantic lyricism, musical performance, song-writing, postcolonial criticism, Orientalism and biographical writing- as well as defining the significance of his voice as an engaged social and political commentator of a strongly cosmopolitan and pluralistic inclination.

This volume questions and qualifies commonly accepted assumptions about the early modern English sonnet: that it was a strictly codified form, most often organised in sequences, which only emerged at the very end of the sixteenth century and declined as fast as it had bloomed, and that minor poets merely participated in the sonnet fashion by replicating established conventions. Drawing from book history and relying on close reading and textual criticism, this collection offers a more nuanced account of the history of the sonnet. It discusses how sonnets were written, published and received in England as compared to mainland Europe, and explores the works of major (Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser) and minor (Barnes, Harvey) poets alike. Reflecting on current editorial practices, it also provides the first modern edition of an early seventeenth-century Elizabethan miscellany including sonnets presumably by Sidney and Spenser. -- .

Prepared in light of recent discoveries in the field, this is the first volume of a modern, four-volume edition of the Greek lyric fragments. The book presents fragments from Alcman, Stesichorus, and Ibycus, along with a preface, a brief exegetical commentary, and ancient testimonia relating to the poets' art and life. All of the text is in Latin or Greek.

This labyrinthine and extraordinary book, first published more than fifty years ago, was the outcome of Graves's vast reading and curious research into strange territories of folklore, mythology, religion and magic. Erudite and impassioned, it is a scholar-poet's quest for the meaning of European myths, a polemic about the relations between man and woman, and also an intensely personal document in which Graves explored the sources of his own inspiration and, as he believed, all true poetry. This new edition has been prepared by Grevel Lindop, who has written an illuminating introduction. The text of the book incorporates all Graves's final revisions, as well as his replies to two of the original reviewers, and a long essay in which he describes the months of inspiration in which The White Goddess was written.

First published in 1964, this volume remains the standard introduction to Pindar.

Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation spans the boundaries between literary studies and history. It looks at the impact of tyrannical government on the work of poets, playwrights, and prose writers of the early English Renaissance. It shows the profound effects that political oppression had on the literary production of the years from 1528 to 1547, and how English writers in turn strove to mitigate, redirect, and finally resist that oppression. The result was the destruction of a number of forms that had dominated the literary production of late-medieval England, but also the creation of new forms that were to dominate the writing of the following centuries. Paradoxically, the tyranny of Henry VIII gave birth to many modes of writing now seen to be characteristic of the English literary Renaissance.

This book explores the minds of Donne, George and Edward Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, Marvell, and Traherne. It brings to light the characteristics of their modes of self-awareness, their perception of time and space, and their religious sensibility, challenging the postmodernist assumption that no definite or constant self can be traced in the works of a writer.

Called by her contemporaries the "Tenth Muse," Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648-1695) has continued to stir both popular and scholarly imaginations. While generations of Mexican schoolchildren have memorized her satirical verses, only since the 1970s has her writing received consistent scholarly attention., focused on complexities of female authorship in the political, religious, and intellectual context of colonial New Spain. This volume examines those areas of scholarship that illuminate her work, including her status as an iconic figure in Latin American and Baroque letters, popular culture in Mexico and the United States, and feminism. By addressing the multiple frameworks through which to read her work, this research guide serves as a useful resource for scholars and students of the Baroque in Europe and Latin America, colonial Novohispanic religious institutions, and women's and gender studies. The chapters are distributed across four sections that deal broadly with different aspects of Sor Juana's life and work: institutional contexts (political, economic, religious, intellectual, and legal); reception history; literary genres; and directions for future research. Each section is designed to provide the reader with a clear understanding of the current state of the research on those topics and the academic debates within each field.

Strange Likeness provides the first full account of how Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) was rediscovered by twentieth-century poets, and the uses to which they put that discovery in their own writing. Chapters deal with Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Edwin Morgan, and Seamus Heaney. Stylistic debts to Old English are examined, along with the effects on these poets' work of specific ideas about Old English language and literature as taught while these poets were studying the subject at university. Issues such as linguistic primitivism, the supposed 'purity' of the English language, the politics and ethics of translation, and the construction of 'Englishness' within the literary canon are discussed in the light of these poets and their Old English encounters. Heaney's translation of Beowulf is fully contextualized within the body of the rest of his work for the first time.

Exploring the diverse factors that persuaded Christopher Columbus that he could reach the fabled "East" by sailing west, Dante, Columbus and the Prophetic Tradition considers, first, the impact of Dante's Divine Comedy and the apocalyptic prophetic tradition that it reflects, on Columbus's perception both of the cosmos and the eschatological meaning of his journey to what he called an 'other world.' In so doing, the book considers how affinities between himself and the exiled poet might have led Columbus to see himself as a divinely appointed agent of the apocalypse and his enterprise as the realization of the spiritual journey chronicled in the Comedy. As part of this study, the book necessarily examines the cultural space that Dante's poem, its geography, cosmography and eschatology, enjoyed in late fifteenth century Spain as well as Columbus's own exposure to it. As it considers how Italian writers and artists of the late Renaissance and Counter Reformation received the news of Columbus' 'discovery' and appropriated the figure of Dante and the pseudo-prophecy of the Comedy to interpret its significance, the book examines how Tasso, Ariosto, Stradano and Stigliani, in particular, forge a link between Dante and Columbus to present the latter as an inheritor of an apostolic tradition that traces back to the Aeneid. It further highlights the extent to which Italian writers working in the context of the Counter Reformation, use a Dantean filter to propagate the notion of Columbus as a new Paul, that is, a divinely appointed apostle to the New World, and the Roman Church as the rightful emperor of the souls encountered there.

This critical study explores the relationship between Hopkins' poetic art and his philosophy and shows why Hopkins' poetry has endured. Sean Sheehan is the author of a study of anarchism and of a guide to Wittgenstein.

The Jacobean Spenserian poets, William Browne, George Wither, and Christopher Brooke, formed a distinctive oppositional community in the years 1612 to 1625. Their collective responses to contemporary events sheds new light on the literary and political culture of the early seventeenth century.

Conversations with W. S. Merwin is the first collection of interviews with former United States Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin (b. 1927). Spanning almost six decades of conversations, the collection touches on such topics as Merwin's early influences (Robert Graves and Ezra Pound), his location within the twin poles of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, his extraordinary work as a translator, as well as his decades-long interest in environmental conservation. Anticipating the current sustainability movement and the debates surrounding major and minor literatures, Merwin was, and still is, a visionary. At age eighty-eight, he is among the most distinguished poets, translators, and thinkers in the United States. A major link between the period of literary modernism and its contemporary extensions, Merwin has been a force in American letters for many decades, and his translations from the Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, and other languages, have earned him unanimous praise and admiration. Merwin also wrote at the forefront of literature's environmental advocacy and early on articulated concerns about ecology and sustainability. Now, for the first time, Conversations with W. S. Merwin offers insight into the various dimensions of Merwin's thought by treating his interviews as a self-standing category in his oeuvre. More than casual narratives that interpret the occasional poem or relay an occasional experience, they afford literary and cultural historians a view into the larger through-lines of Merwin's thinking.

Hugh MacDiarmid (born Christopher Murray Grieve) is a huge, and still controversial, figure in modern Scottish literature. Called variously "the most important figure in Scottish life in the twentieth century" and "a symbol of all that's perfectly hideous in Scotland", his poetry is of historic, and national, significance. Alan Riach's SCOTNOTE study guide outlines MacDiarmid's life and work, providing an overview of the poet's beliefs, opinions and influences, for senior school pupils and students at all levels.